Duke - Paul Baerman M.B.A. '90 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90 en Follow the Joy https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/follow-joy <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>By ten minutes to seven, Fuqua’s Geneen Auditorium buzzes with preparation. Organizers shoo away early comers while the tech crew repeatedly tests the video feed and microphones, consulting over headsets. Each of the 450 seats has a program on it; many also sport a Thunderstick, a hollow tube for claquers to pound on or hoot through. The crowd will be big—and noisy. Welcome to the 13th Annual Duke Start-Up Challenge Grand Finale.</p> <p>At stake on this warm April evening is a $50,000 prize and recognition as Duke’s top entrepreneur. After a months-long process of elimination, 118 teams have been winnowed to three, two led by undergraduate liberal-arts majors. To earn a shot at the grand prize, they beat out thirty-four teams from the business school, thirty from the engineering school, and sixteen led by faculty. They’ll have ten minutes to pitch.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/joy-320x200.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p>James Sawabini [Credit: Donn Young]</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>One of them is James Sawabini, a lanky senior who paces restlessly, practicing his speech in his head. In an open-necked checked shirt and sport coat—“Just managing the brand,” he laughs—Sawabini has launched a start-up called Zamsolar, which would sell solar cell-phone chargers and solar-powered light fixtures in Zambia. The venture already has won a $1,000 “track prize” for being the contest’s best social-enterprise idea. Tonight he’ll try to sell it to a dozen skeptical judges: successful entrepreneurs, potential investors, hard-minded business people with a soft spot for Duke.</p> <p>When I saw him earlier in the week—he had changed the location of our meeting three times in nine hours, finally settling on a coffee shop—Sawabini had admitted to being terrified of his presentation. “I pretty much cleared the decks this week to practice,” he said. “It’s like a lamb to the slaughter. I see the holes in our plan as well as they do. There are a million ways to say, ‘What you’re doing is crazy, and I’m not interested.’ But go to Zambia, go to Tanzania, go to Uganda. Most people have never seen these products before, and these products can change their lives. It’s not about making money. It’s about taking an inefficiency and fixing it.”</p> <p>Winning the $50,000 prize would enable Sawabini to go to Zambia after graduation and get Zamsolar on its feet. His business partner, a senior at Yale University, will not be coming down for the grand finals. If he fails tonight, they plan “to chase private investors all over the place.”</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/joy-250x375.jpg" style="height:375px; width:250px" /> <p>Vijay Agarwal [Credit: Donn Young]</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>Out in the hallway, Sawabini’s competitors have been working the well-wishers and the well-wired. Vijay Agarwal, who grew up in San Francisco and has been starting companies since he was sixteen (“Nothing we ended up taking to market was successful”), strides into the auditorium and introduces his business partner, an engineer just in from California. Wearing a snappy black tie and an ultra-conservative black suit, Agarwal, too, is managing the brand, right down to his hospital pager. A second-year resident in neurosurgery at Duke Hospital, he is touting a plastic clip designed to replace the titanium ones commonly used in brain surgery. Being plastic, the clip doesn’t interfere with MRIs or CAT scans, allowing doctors to spot postsurgical problems. “In the ICU, where I spend a significant portion of my time, I could show you how this device would help people,” he boasts.</p> <p>Having grown up in the Bay area, Agarwal knew what he was looking for; he chose Duke precisely for its supportive climate for innovation. “The way the neurosurgery program here stepped up has been phenomenal. People meet me in between OR cases when they should be eating. They stay up at night going over stuff when they should be sleeping.”</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>"There are a million ways to say 'What you're doing is crazy and I'm not interested.'"</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>Agarwal’s company, CranioVation, also found favor early on, winning last fall’s elevator-pitch competition for health-care ventures. With just a few moments before showtime, he excuses himself to make a call.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/joy-320x200b.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p>Ting-Ting Zhou [Credit: Donn Young]</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>Last to enter the room is Ting-Ting Zhou ’13, who has formed a company called Nanoly with two other women, one a Berkeley undergrad she’s known since childhood, the other a Stanford grad student. Nanoly wants to test and market a hydrogel that could revolutionize vaccine delivery, especially in the Third World, by eliminating the need for cold storage.</p> <p>The Nanoly team has been busy, talking to PATH, an international nonprofit that leverages government and foundation money to address world health issues; applying for grants from the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation; and approaching the U.S. Department of Defense for research funding. They look to the World Health Organization as a first customer and to a major big pharma player eventually to acquire them.</p> <p>“This semester,” says Zhou, an officer in the Duke Association for Business Oriented Women, “has been about entering as many competitions as we can. The Dell Social Innovation Challenge, Cornell, Berkeley. Berkeley has a lot. Any pitch competition, we’ll just try to go.”</p> <p>Entrepreneurism is not something Zhou picked up from her Duke education, at least not directly. “None of my classes have been entrepreneurial at all,” she says. “Writing a business plan—you can Google that. Everything’s on the Internet. Yes, there are professors who may have worked in venture capital in the past, but it’s not the same as the Internet.”</p> <p>Where the Internet fails, another kind of network succeeds. Needing a pitch video for the competition, Zhou reached out to friends in the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image and in the Center for Documentary Studies to shoot and edit one. That professional-looking video has already helped snag $20,000 for Nanoly, which won the Start-Up Challenge’s undergraduate track and women-led track.</p> <p>“One of the amazing things Duke has given me are the relationships, the people I’ve met. I never take meals alone, ever. My calendar is filled with lunch and dinner two weeks in advance. When people cancel, I immediately call someone else to say, ‘I have an opening.’ ”</p> <p>Though Zhou’s West Coast partners are not coming tonight, Zhou will be cheered on by her parents, who have come down from New Jersey for the event. In the early going with Nanoly, they were encouraging, Zhou says, but cautioned her to keep her grades up. “I said, ‘But I want to change the world, Mom.’ ”</p> <p>Students like James Sawabini, Vijay Agarwal, and Ting-Ting Zhou can leave you breathless, inspired, exhausted. Whatever happens in Geneen Auditorium tonight, all have vowed to continue pursuing their peculiar passion. Although the restless intensity of their ambition may set them apart from typical students, they are emblems of a deeper sea change at Duke (and perhaps in society at large) of which the Start-Up Challenge is only the most visible manifestation.</p> <p>Let’s not overstate the case: <em>Entrepreneurship</em> still gets fewer hits on Google than the Bible or Qu’ran. But from President Obama on down, the word is on everybody’s lips. Entrepreneurship is sexy, maddening, and arguably critical to our country’s emergence from the economic doldrums. It’s capitalism working right for a change. Yet the concept is boring, fuzzy, and overused; its center is everywhere and its edge nowhere. It’s a stalking horse, a shibboleth, a panacea, a paradox. If you want to save the world, start a company. If you want to make money, create wealth. If you’re worried about getting an A, forget it.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>"You're trying to re-create AT&amp;T in Zambia."</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>For years a half dozen of Duke’s schools have sported degrees, programs, centers, clubs, and certificates focused on entrepreneurship; there have long been courses, clinics, practicums, mentoring, incubators, and lately even shared living space, with onomastic redundancies sufficient to make your eyes glaze. There’s a Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization; a Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation; an Enterprising Leadership Initiative; a Markets and Management Certificate Program; a Program for Entrepreneurs; a Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship; and much more. Faculty members have their own demesnes, including the Duke-Coulter Translational Partnership Grant Program to get engineers and doctors inventing together, as well as the longstanding Office of Licensing and Ventures to help push brilliant ideas into the marketplace.</p> <p>But while the antechambers and outbuildings of innovation and entrepreneurship were well furnished, the central room has remained vacant until very lately. Students, for example, complained about the difficulty of obtaining course credit for new ventures; alumni complained about the difficulty of finding like-minded classmates. To be an entrepreneur at Duke you had to make yourself an expert on way more than just your Big Idea. As Kimberly Jenkins ’76, M.Ed. ’77, Ph.D. ’80, puts it, “The culture was organic, not intentional.”</p> <p>Jenkins, a former trustee who has worked alongside both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, has been one of the key drivers for changing that culture. Serving from 2010 until this July as senior adviser to the president and provost for innovation and entrepreneurship, she crafted a strategic plan and helped raise money—including a $15 million gift from trustee David Rubenstein ’70—for new programs such as Mentors on Call and Duke in Silicon Valley. Duke’s vision in this area owes much to Jenkins’ own.</p> <p>“I have a deep passion for entrepreneurship based on the joy it has brought me,” says Jenkins. “Our students are wellrounded, sociable, fun, incredibly smart, passionate, and relentless. Those are the same qualities it takes to be an entrepreneur. But entrepreneurship is harder than most people think.”</p> <p>Tony Brown would concur. He’s a fixer, an instigator, a coach, a gadfly who founded the Enterprising Leadership Initiative within the Sanford School of Public Policy’s Hart Leadership Program and who can rattle off dozens of examples of successful social and commercial enterprises led by his alumni. But he points out “there’s a difference between entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship preparation, and entrepreneurship education. Most entrepreneurship happens five years out of college, ten years out of college, and to make the bet that we’re going to scale entrepreneurship rather than entrepreneurship preparation—you gotta be careful of that.” Asked if he plans to attend the Start-Up Challenge finale, he waves his hand dismissively.</p> <p>Yet Brown, too, has noted the sea change, and noted it with pleasure. “My work is now mainstream,” he nods. “Duke is serious about this. The challenge is to be clear about our objectives.”</p> <p>For a growing cast of faculty and staff members, students, alumni, and parents, the objective is to weave an entrepreneurial way of thinking into the very fabric of Duke’s culture. The best way to do so, they reckon, is by using entrepreneurial techniques: favor networks over hierarchies, prefer hard work to a brilliant idea, let everybody play.</p> <blockquote> <p>"I want to be sure the plans and pitches that come out of Duke are at the top of the heap compared to those anywhere in the world."</p> </blockquote> <p>The Start-Up Challenge is a perfect example. More than 300 volunteer judges winnowed the original 118 teams down to three, each of which includes members from other universities or the private sector. The finale is run by Fuqua and Pratt students, who seem lighthearted about the fact that none of their schools’ sixty-four teams made the cut. Behind each business plan there’s a lot of mentoring, sharing, trust—and yes, hard work.</p> <p>But are entrepreneurs really different? Tonight’s show is a decent test case. The audience starts trickling in, students bringing beer and wine, and the atmosphere becomes jovial. The Blue Devil is working the crowd, and the room takes on an almost-rowdy disposition, more like a sporting event or a concert, a scaled-down version of <em>American Idol</em>. And as with <em>Idol</em>, there’s a paradox at play in the equally tantalizing possibilities that any one of the finalists may dazzle the crowd or be eaten alive by the judges’ critiques.</p> <p>One of those judges is Reid Lewis ’84, cofounder and president of Group Logic, a company that integrates Apple products into Windows-based server systems. Although it can easily take a couple hours to review and comment on a start-up proposal, Lewis knows hundreds of hours go into writing one. “As an undergrad there’s an immense array of things that distract you from that work. We want to make sure people get the best possible feedback and that they can create not just a good ‘student plan’ but a good business plan,” he says. “I want to be sure the plans and pitches that come out of Duke are at the top of the heap compared to those anywhere in the world.”</p> <p>Lewis sees the Start-Up Challenge as fitting under the rubric of the Duke Global Entrepreneurship Network—DukeGEN— which he helped create back in 2008 as a support network for entrepreneurs. Although DukeGEN has a speakers’ series, networking events from coast to coast, a website, a blog, and an extremely active LinkedIn discussion group, at bottom “it’s not a place—not even a virtual place—but a set of relationships and potential relationships,” Lewis says. “It’s organic, it’s reactive, ever-evolving, self-sustaining. It’s a community whose utility and intelligence are invisible, baked in.” And it’s only for Dukies. Anyone with a Duke connection can join, and many quickly discover that they “can have a huge impact on other people’s efforts, on their trajectory, with a little bit of time and knowledge that [they] already have.”</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/joy-320x200c_0.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p><strong>Welcome to the club:</strong> Howie Rhee sees the Start-Up Challenge as part of an extended entrepreneurial network that can support Duke students throughout their careers. [Credit: Donn Young]</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>“DukeGEN is all about providing value,” agrees Howie Rhee M.B.A. ’04, looking over the crowd with a proprietary air as the auditorium fills. As managing director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and himself a founder of two start-ups, Rhee is DukeGEN’s straw boss, apologist, and troubleshooter, the man behind the curtain. He makes sure that DukeGEN stays focused not on events but people— on helping people start their business, assemble the right team, get answers quickly. “Duke is a very risk-averse culture,” he notes. “I think of what I’m doing as actually creating a movement. I want to engage people such that students, alumni, faculty, and staff are part of the movement, such that this is a bigger lifelong change for them.” It’s this kind of attitude that has turned the thirteen-year old Start-Up Challenge into a phenomenon.</p> <blockquote> <p>"Entrepreneurism is a skill, like shooting a basketball, and if you want to get better at it, you have to practice."</p> </blockquote> <p>Rhee envisions a continuous Dukecentered entrepreneurial community from matriculation to death, with the Start-Up Challenge somewhere near the front end. “Starting a company can be pretty lonely and stressful. You feel like you’re on your own in the middle of nowhere. Through this movement we’re trying to make it feel like you’re part of something and that people will help you.”</p> <p>Or help you back up again. Among entrepreneurs, failure isn’t something to be forgiven; it’s almost a badge of honor. “Entrepreneurism is a skill, like shooting a basketball,” says Rhee, “and if you want to get better at it, you have to practice. Part of getting better at it is just doing it again and again.”</p> <p>Tony Brown puts it bluntly: “Unless somebody’s failed a couple times, I’m not going to fund them. Some kids come to Duke without having tasted failure. It gets in the way of their efficacy.”</p> <p>What good fortune, then, that on the night of the Start-Up Challenge two of the three finalists will fail. Indeed, the road is littered with corpses: Two-thirds of the entrants didn’t survive past written summaries; the forty that moved on had to create a website and a video pitch. Judges whittled those down to nine semifinalists, all of whom are invited to the grand finale. Those who didn’t make the final three get to do one-minute elevator pitches, a kind of warm-up act for the main attraction to follow.</p> <p>The audience rises to the occasion with hoots and whistles as we zoom through presentations on a new crowd-funding site, a “revolutionary tool that aims to bridge the disconnect between the physical and digital worlds,” a DNA-based marker for keeping frackers honest, and a scheme for providing home health care in China. One presenter brings in a prototype of athletic apparel, inviting the judges to stroke it; another finishes with a balletic leap to get offstage within his minute. A third forgets that the projectors are shining his presentation right across his face.</p> <p>Keynote speaker Rich Lee, a Duke parent and serial entrepreneur who has donated half the $50,000 prize money, takes the stage to invoke Archilochus’ ancient notion that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The lesson for entrepreneurs, Lee concludes, is that “somebody will pay hedgehogs for what they love to do.” The crowd roars with delight, and the three champions stir. Vijay Agarwal’s knee is oscillating at about 180 beats per minute as he looks darkly at his pager and reaches for his mobile phone. Hospital calling.</p> <p>In past years, the winner has been chosen in advance behind closed doors, but this time the event has been tweaked so it all happens live. There’s no rehearsal, no safety net. The raked slope of the auditorium makes the stage seem like a gladiatorial arena; the judges, holed up at center left, are the lions.</p> <p>Agarwal goes first. He skillfully navigates his material but then seems to dodge a question about his pricing model. Someone whispers—eliciting a groan—that the neurosurgical device is a no-brainer; but how do you monetize it? The on-deck undergraduate speakers clutch their hands, fold their arms, cross and uncross their ankles.</p> <p>When Ting-Ting Zhou gets up, she rocks slightly from foot to foot as she talks, racing, forgetting to enunciate. In an interview before the event, she had revealed a possible Achilles heel: Turns out the intellectual property underlying Nanoly’s product is owned by the University of Colorado at Boulder. “They’ve agreed to license it to us,” Zhou assures. “Well, we’ve pretty much assumed they will agree to license it to us. The guys in the lab are willing.”</p> <p>A few mumbled words get lost in the Q&amp;A, but Zhou acquits herself with valor: Her team members have already engaged the FDA, Merck, patent lawyers, and venture capitalists. She’ll be taking the summer off to raise another round of funding.</p> <p>James Sawabini speaks last, emboldened by having the most vocal contingent in the audience; indeed, he also won the pre-contest Facebook popularity contest, getting up early to text his friends around the country and amass more than 600 votes.</p> <p>“Hey, guys,” he begins with a disarming smile, and like the others he has a lot to say. Showing up early pays off—he’s comfortable with the room and stage—but he stumbles over a transposed phrase, recovers, laughs with the crowd, and then gets cut off at the end, reaching his ten-minute mark just as he tumbles to a conclusion. The judges are sympathetic but skeptical. “You’re trying to re-create AT&amp;T in Zambia,” one challenges immediately. Asked how his team would manage the large organization required, he describes running his high-school newspaper.</p> <p>In another bit of <em>American Idol</em> showmanship, the three finalists gather back on stage to hear the judges’ pre-vote critiques. While there is considerable praise for the quality and depth of thinking in all three business plans, the panel gets quickly to the nitty-gritty. “Two of these three businesses— Zamsolar and Nanoly—sell to customers who don’t have any money to spend,” says one judge flatly. “Investors need to make money.” Another questions how Sawabini and his business partner could put together an African distribution network. “What if,” someone wonders gently, “you did a smaller market with more than one product?”</p> <p>“Focus less on the idea and more on the execution,” advises another.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/joy-320x200d.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p><strong>Decision time:</strong> Judges huddle onstage to weigh the three presentations. [Credit: Donn Young]</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>But Agarwal’s CranioVation, which looks like it might have the lead, also takes a hit for his being perhaps too eager to exit the market at almost any time. And, notes judge Karen LeVert, president and CEO of Southeast TechInventures, “all the projects are undercapitalized.”</p> <p>Finally Tom McMurray B.S.E. ’76, M.S. ’78, Ph.D. ’80, president of Marine Ventures Foundation, poses a question to all three. “If you were approached by a major foundation that said, ‘We’ll give you $50 million if you agree to become a nonprofit and never take more than $200,000 a year out of the business,’ would you pursue the business plan under those terms?” Zhou instantly answers affirmatively, and after a pause, so does Agarwal. Sawabini is silent.</p> <p>The presenters step down, and the audience starts tweeting in votes, which count for 20 percent of the final tally. The judges, who get the other 80 percent, form a football huddle onstage. Some kneel, others lean in to hear better as behind them the Blue Devil hurls Tshirts into a screaming audience.</p> <p>After a few moments, the din recedes, and Rich Lee emerges on stage with an envelope, which he opens to a Thunderstick drumroll. “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s winner…” Lee beams, “Nanoly.”</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/joy-320x200e.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p><strong>To the victor:</strong> Zhou beams as Nanoly is announced as the winner of the grand prize. [Credit: Donn Young]</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>Ting-Ting Zhou is mobbed, looking like a beauty queen as she poses with the inevitable gigantic check. I fight my way through the crush to ask her what she wishes she had done differently. “The Q&amp;A,” she says immediately and earnestly. “I should have been better prepared.” Her parents hover in the background, letting her have her moment.</p> <p>I ask Agarwal the same question. He shrugs. “We would have won if I’d had a better answer about pricing.”</p> <p>Sawabini lingers as the boisterous mob thins out. I raise an eyebrow at him. “I guess I could have talked more about profitability and all that crap,” he says irritably, then pauses.</p> <p>“You know this is only the first iteration of our plan.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Baerman M.B.A. ’90 is a playwright and essayist. He lives in Chapel Hill.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-10-02T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, October 2, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/joy-1200x700.jpg" width="1200" height="700" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/entrepreneurship" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Entrepreneurship</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> Yes <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Undergrads take on faculty in an annual contest that’s redefining the Duke culture. What’s the big deal about entrepreneurship?</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Tue, 02 Oct 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498914 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/follow-joy#comments The Problem of Giftedness https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/problem-giftedness <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <div class="media-header flr" style="width: 401 px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 400px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="The Problem of Giftedness" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-hands.jpg" style="height:512px; width:400px" /> <p>Lacey Chylack</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Four boys and ten girls pile out of vans at Duke’s Lemur Center and rally quickly in a mobile trailer, leaving an impression of braces, acne, and plaid. Most have a limegreen badge holder identifying them as students in Duke’s Talent Identification Program (TIP); a few sport electric-orange badges, signifying longevity in the program. The youngest is fourteen; all are considered gifted according to their performances on standardized tests normally reserved for much older kids. “How was your weekend?” demands instructor Erin Ehmke, a primatologist. “We ate a Vermonster in four minutes—that’s twenty scoops of ice cream,” explains a girl proudly.</p> <p>In short order, their written hypotheses and conclusions from last week’s research are returned. Feet are jiggling. Uh-oh. “Okay,” Ehmke says briskly, “Tell me about scan sampling. How does it differ from focal sampling and ad lib sampling?” Hands shoot up, voice tumbling over voice. “Great,” she continues. “Today we’ll be using a combination of these techniques to assess inter-observer reliability. Pick a new partner.”</p> <p>Class has been meeting six days a week to study primate biology by doing what primate biologists do. A week into living and studying together day in and day out, this cadre of students knows one another well. Yet they have to be prodded into switching partners, which is relevant when you’re going to test inter-observer reliability, a measure of how well two scientists’ research data jive in the field. And if such a concept seems advanced for eighthgraders— well, you haven’t met these kids.</p> <p>Armed with clipboards, off they troop to the lemur cages in teams of two, ungainly primates at an awkward adolescent threshold. Now they stand rapt, the icecream eater with one bare leg akimbo, foot on knee in a gesture familiar to flamingos and <em>homo sapiens</em> juveniles. With perfect balance, she remains motionless, silently jotting notes while before her a graceful adult lemur cavorts and leaps half a dozen body lengths to get food. Around her, cicadas rise to a slow crescendo, then relax, and the North Carolina heat begins its inexorable climb. She stands almost beyond time, concentrated, intense, perched.</p> <p>Over on East Campus, economist John Kane watches half a dozen small groups of teens hammer out the pricing implications of supply and demand curves. One kid with an orange lanyard (it’s his fourth summer at TIP) explains a graph to two companions with the help of much gesticulation and a chalkboard; another group discusses Frisbee grips and technique; a smattering of individuals write quietly alone.</p> <p>Shortly, Kane rounds them up. “Now let’s talk about diminishing returns,” he says. Soon he has a gangly guy racing across the room’s diagonal to see how many balls can be moved from one box to another in thirty seconds. Kane adds a second runner, then a third, keeping track of their totals as the crowd shouts out advice. One of the runners trips and sprawls on the floor, getting in the way of the other two. Everybody cracks up. After a certain point, it transpires, more runners don’t help the totals. They need more baskets, not more people. <em>Voilà</em>: the law of diminishing returns.</p> <p>The class will go on to use its new analytical tools to examine the problem of scarce resources as it plays out in minimum- wage laws, farm subsidies, rent controls, trade protectionism, pollution, and welfare programs. One of TIP’s articles of faith is that its students can soak up an entire semester’s worth of college-level material in three weeks. During a break in the action, I ask Kane if he really covers that much. “Actually,” he laughs, “we cover more.” A professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, he has spent every summer at TIP since 1987 and has the T-shirts to prove it.</p> <p>Meanwhile, in a class called “Big Screen, Little Screen,” students are using improv to generate ideas for movies. A girl wraps a boy’s head in a sweater, and a costume is born. “I feel like doing an interpretive dance!” exclaims another, and off she goes. As the groups review their scenarios, screenwriter Rick Dillwood, their “producer,” laughs aloud: “The number of skits that end in mass death is a concern.” This group is mastering idea development, experimenting with story, character, dialogue, and setting as they work on their scripts. Soon the class will vote on which to cast, shoot, edit, and screen at the end of its three weeks.</p> <div class="media-header fll " style="width: 351px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Do you see what I see?" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-tip.jpg" style="height:232px; width:350px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Do you see what I see?:</strong> During a Nasher Museum excursion, TIP students paired off for visual-exploration exercise. Dr. J Caldwell</div> <div class="media-h-credit">&nbsp; <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Through its residential program at Duke and related programs at eight other sites, TIP offers dozens of courses, spanning topics from the molecular biology of cancer to how material properties change at the nanoscale. The material is tough and edgy, representing some of the trendiest fields in higher education. And the kids are up to the challenge, eighth-graders ready for college material. These campers have emerged from a region-wide talent search that began with a pool of some 70,000 students who accepted an invitation to take the SAT or ACT as seventhgraders. TIP annually honors the 25,000 highest scorers in state and regional ceremonies and invites an even more select group of about 2,000 for a special recognition ceremony on Duke’s campus. It’s this group—the top 3 percent of the top 3 percent—that receives an invitation to TIP’s three-week summer programs.</p> <p>Experiences targeting the gifted are important in ways that many people don’t think about. As intellectually robust as these students may be, at some level every fourteen-year-old is delicate, and the precocious, talented, and brilliant are no exception. In fact, they may have it worse. As long ago as 1926, when Columbia University’s Leta Hollingworth codified her pioneering research in the book <em>Gifted Children</em>, educators have known that in mainstream school settings extremely bright students can fall idle. According to a 2003 study by Case Western Reserve University psychiatrist Sylvia Rimm, children testing as gifted comprise 10 to 20 percent of high-school dropouts—who may be bored, hypersensitive, depressed, misunderstood, ridiculed, frustrated, isolated, unpopular, or socially inept.</p> <p>There is contemporary research on adolescent substance abuse and giftedness, underachievement and giftedness, aggression and giftedness, depression and giftedness. And yet barely half of America’s gifted learners are getting the services they need to stay engaged in the classroom, according to a 2002 report by former teachers James Delisle and Judy Galbraith.</p> <p>Part of the problem is that giftedness remains a controversial subject. Battles have raged over whether to test children for achievement or potential (e.g., SATs vs. IQ tests); over whether to test them against a body of knowledge or against each other; over “treatments” favoring enrichment or acceleration (e.g., field trips vs. skipping grades); and over performance gaps in gender, race, native language, and socioeconomic status.</p> <div class="media-header top2"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Case study" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-class.jpg" style="height:432px; width:670px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Case study:</strong> TIP instructor Don Donelson leads students through an exploration of clinical-trial advocacy.<br /> Megan Morr <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>TIP was founded thirty years ago with a bias toward action. The program was conceived by then-provost Bill Bevan A.M. ’43, Ph.D. ’48, Hon. ’72; Bob Sawyer, then director of Duke Summer Programs; and educational psychologist Julian Stanley, whose research project on mathematically precocious youth had led to the formation of Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth in the 1970s. The inchoate TIP had modest expectations, aiming to secure a regional talent-search monopoly in the Southeast, while leaving most of the country to Johns Hopkins, Northwestern University, and others. In its first year, the program attracted fewer than 8,700 participants, ultimately admitting 151 students to its summer program.</p> <p>One of those pioneering teenagers was Chris Imershein ’90, who ended up using his TIP courses to place out of Trinity College’s distribution and major requirements in math, Pascal programming, computer science, and English. Yet Imershein credits TIP with something that in retrospect he sees as more important: “the whole social aspect of it—the feeling of acceptance, not feeling so weird or out of place.” At the same time it was, he says, the first time he can remember having to struggle with academic work.</p> <p>This year, 71,203 seventh-graders took the SAT or ACT under TIP’s auspices, with 3,183 enrolling in summer programs. “All of the talent-search numbers for the rest of the country combined don’t equal ours,” points out TIP executive director Martha Putallaz, now in her eighth year running the program. Despite declines in education funding nationally, TIP increased its budget by 37 percent since the financial crisis, as federal and state budget cuts precipitated a flood of private investment by anxious parents and foundations. TIP’s own innovations didn’t hurt either: In 2010, 36,000 fourth- and fifth-graders received advice, support, and (for some) face-to-face “Academic Adventure” and independentlearning programs developed by TIP specifically to reach younger kids.</p> <p>Although TIP receives no money directly from Duke, its affiliation with the university helps in other ways, Putallaz notes. Duke’s international connections were critical in launching a pilot program in India, and programs in Singapore and China will debut in 2012 and 2013, respectively.</p> <p>Despite its rapid expansion, TIP’s fundamentals have changed little in the past three decades. It all starts with the talent search: TIP analyzes scores on standardized tests from sixteen states to identify seventh- graders with high academic achievement and invites them to take either the SAT or the ACT. “Once upon a time, the talent search was a game-changer for a lot of families,” says Mark DeLong A.M. ’81, Ph.D. ’87, TIP’s director of operations from 1988 to 1994, “because at last they had evidence they could leverage” with school systems, principals, teachers—and even within the family. Even today, the of ficial notice from TIP is sometimes the first credible acknowledgement parents receive that their child is special and that they are not necessarily pushy, overbearing, doting, or just plain nuts.</p> <p>Thus the Grand Recognition ceremony, held in Cameron Indoor Stadium, remains a big deal. Scott Greenwood, who served as TIP’s chief operating officer for the last ten years, puts it bluntly: “In a society where everybody gets a ribbon for participating, sometimes it’s good to celebrate real achievement.” This year, some 500 students received their medals on a hot Saturday in May, the bleachers abuzz with the conversation of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and siblings, while on the gym floor, the honorees sat in contemplative silence. Most were dressed up, the boys in ties, the girls in party dresses. Several were too shy—or too unsure of why they were there—to articulate their feelings at their auspicious moment.</p> <div id="container-addins"> <div class="sidebar" id="addins"> <p>They were there, of course, because they nailed an achievement test, which TIP officials say is the most reliable indicator of academic talent. From the beginning, TIP has eschewed IQ tests, which have turned out to predict achievement only moderately well, according to Rick Courtright, a TIP researcher who studies education strategies for gifted students. “An IQ test is absent of school subjects. It asks, What’s your ability to reason, to problem-solve, to think logically when compared to others of the same age?” he says. “Then there’s testing for achievement—readin’, writin’, ’rithmetic—where high performance really would be an indicator of that need for differentiation.”</p> </div> </div> <p>Traditional end-of-grade assessment tests aren’t very useful for identifying this group, either. “End-of-grade tests do a good job of measuring a student’s performance on those skills at that grade level. But the ceiling is very low,” says Courtright. “It doesn’t give that fifth-grader who’s ten years old the chance to show he’s ready for pre-algebra.”</p> <p>Educators of the gifted call it a lack of “headroom”: If 1,000 kids in 10,000 achieve a perfect score on an end-of-grade test, how do you differentiate among those 1,000? Which <em>one</em> child in that group is intellectually five years ahead of her classmates?</p> <p>And when you do find that one, what do you do with her?</p> <p>Well-meaning educators of yore might have tried to keep gifted students busy by assigning them extra problem sets of the same homework they had already mastered, or asking them to tutor slower students in the classroom. In 1988, TIP cofounder Bob Sawyer complained in an article for the <em>Journal for the Education of the Gifted</em> that gifted-education curricula were often trivialized, even embarrassingly so. In some ways, that battle has been won. Schools of education now offer master’s degrees in gifted education, and public and private secondary schools nationwide have adopted gifted curricula, hired or appointed Academically or Intellectually Gifted (AIG) liaisons (as in North Carolina), extended teacher certification to include mastery of how to teach the gifted (as in New York), and provided a steady and ever-growing stream of willing participants to the talent searches of TIP and its peers. The resulting programs tend to be not just advanced but experiential.</p> <div class="media-header fll " style="width: 351px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Dusting for prints" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-forensics.jpg" style="height:265px; width:350px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Dusting for prints:</strong> Thomas Patterson, left, and Joseph Zuckerman work on a fingerprint identification activity during a forensics class.<br /> Megan Morr</div> <div class="media-h-credit">&nbsp; <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Meanwhile, the first generation of TIPsters, now in their forties and at the peak of their careers, has returned to campus with stories, praise—and sometimes even their children. Each year, TIP honors several alumni at the Grand Recognition, making sure future campers take note of the enticing possibilities before them.</p> <p>Take Ben Greenman, a pop-culture editor at <em>The New Yorker</em> and author of several books, including the short-story collection <em>Superbad</em> and the “novel-within-storieswithin- a-novel” <em>Superworse</em>. One of the driest wits in the business, Greenman grew up in Miami and studied writing at TIP in 1983-84, returning as a TA, and graduating from high school at sixteen. Describing fourteen-year olds as “larvae—the good kind of larvae,” he credits TIP with giving him early confidence to pursue his dreams of writing professionally. “As I got older, the thing that always struck me was how generous the faculty was. They gave a lot of time to little kids, and a lot of energy, in helping us to discipline our thought and make sense of this welter in our heads.”</p> <p>Or take Bethany Henderson, a TIPster from 1988-91 and former trial lawyer who left her practice to found City Hall Fellows, a national service corps preparing bright college graduates for careers in local public service. Interns who receive her fellowships get 300 hours of hands-on training in the <em>realpolitik</em> of their home city, helping them figure out who the players are and how policy gets made. Then they take on an ambitious real-world project—using GIS data to get rid of potholes; helping juvenile delinquents reenter the mainstream; increasing local government transparency—and make it happen.</p> <p>For Henderson, TIP was not just about empowering herself but about networking. Fellow TIPsters Ben Farkas, Mackenzie Kaplan Sandler, and Brett Lasher M.B.A. ’04 attended the University of Pennsylvania with Henderson and still keep in touch; TIPster Marni Karlin, counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, nominated her for this year’s TIP alumni award; TIPster Jennifer Chen Hopkins invited her to crash on her couch while Henderson was setting up the Houston branch of the City Hall Fellows; TIPster Sunny Gettinger, a senior manager at Google, reached out to Henderson to offer help when she read about the City Hall Fellows in Florida; and TIPster Andrew Samwick, now a Dartmouth College professor of economics, brought Henderson to his campus in February for student meetings, class visits, and lectures about engaging Millenials in local governance.</p> <p>Or take Amy Abernethy M.D. ’94, who attended TIP in 1983 and 1984. Now a medical oncologist and cancer researcher who serves as associate director of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, she has written more than 130 publications, twenty book chapters, and two textbooks. Until TIP she felt out of place because “the things that interested me just weren’t the same as [what interested] my middleschool friends back in Orlando.” Suddenly it was okay to like science, and suddenly she was in charge of “making sure that I ate my veggies.” Abernethy still keeps a faded photo from her TIP days hanging on her office wall.</p> <p>As TIPsters who eventually took a Duke degree, Abernethy and Chris Imershein are unusual. Although nearly a quarter of first-year Duke students between 2008 and 2011 had participated in the TIP talent search, most TIP kids never return to Duke. Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions, is quick to point out that while TIP is a great way for young teens to be introduced to Duke, more simply, it’s a way for students to be introduced to qualities that schools like Duke look for.</p> <p>“There are always going to be students who participate in TIP that we’re not going to admit,” he says. “Nor does participation automatically mean we’re going to send them an application, even if they’ve been affiliated for a number of years.” In any case, he says, “the degree to which TIP was seen as a recruitment arm of the university would affect its ability to<em> be</em> an enrichment program.”</p> <p>Ben Greenman’s experience in the 1980s bears out Guttentag’s point. “There were other kinds of programs my friends went to where kids ended up getting a sense that there was something amiss. They were pawns in someone else’s game. I wouldn’t have gone back if I had thought that.”</p> <p>But there is one ulterior motive for nurturing the hyper-smart: Scholars and policymakers are hungry for new research on gifted-child education, and programs like TIP can provide a wealth of data, following the gifted out into the world.</p> <p>“We have demographic and test-score data on over two million kids,” says TIP director Putallaz, “including information from many of them on what college they attended, what they did in college, and what they went on to do [for a living]. Everyone in the gifted world has dreamed of having access to such data.” With research scientists and specialists on staff, she says, “we’re present at conferences in a way we weren’t before. We’re publishing. We’re becoming players in the research field.”</p> <p>This spring, former TIP researcher Kristen Foster Peairs received the National Association of Gifted Children Dissertation Award for work on how peer relationships can shed light on the socioemotional development of gifted youth, and she returns to the program this fall for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. TIP research scientist Jonathan Wai won a 2010 Mensa Award for Excellence in Research on the role of spatial ability in the development of gifted children and adults. And another paper still under review reveals some compelling results— such as that, compared to gifted kids who did not attend a TIP summer program, TIP attendees were more likely to wind up with a National Merit Scholarship or attend a top university, three times more likely to earn a doctorate, and five times more likely to work as an academic scientist. (They also reported working eight or more hours over the weekly average compared to other gifted adults.)</p> <div class="media-header flr " style="width: 365px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 364px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Primate biologists in training" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-bio.jpg" style="height:342px; width:364px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Primate biologists in training:</strong> Jessie Feng, left, instructor Erin Ehmke, and Mary Clarke Worthington compare field observations collected during Lemur Center trip.<br /> Megan Morr</div> <div class="media-h-credit">&nbsp; <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Still, for all TIP’s success—cutting-edge research, famous alumni, impressive new ventures, and promising growth—in some ways administrators are disappointed: TIP struggles to keep up with demand.</p> <p>For one thing, despite endowments and gifts that enable TIP to award more than $2 million in grants and scholarships— some merit-based and some need-based— their means are insufficient to meet every student’s needs. That is, the difference in services and support provided to the haves and have-nots, even among the gifted, is worsening. Seven of TIP’s sixty-six employees are assigned to the Next Generation Venture Fund, a flagship program run in tandem with Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth and supported by The Goldman Sachs Foundation. The fund, which targets gifted youth in disadvantaged minority groups, faces an uncertain future when its current funding runs out in three years.</p> <p>And despite expanding internationally and adding partner institutions, TIP can’t serve everybody who can afford it, much less everybody who needs it. For all their extreme selectivity, TIP courses—wherever they are offered—can fill within hours of opening registration, and the waiting list for summer programs, already over 1,000 students, gets longer every year.</p> <p>As each cohort of gifted junior-high and high-school students ages out, larger numbers replace them. “There’s population growth in this region, so more gifted kids are identified than in the past; besides, our brand is stronger so more parents know of us,” explains departing TIP chief operating officer Scott Greenwood.</p> <p>Not a bad problem to have.</p> <p>Back at the Duke Lemur Center, the intensely concentrating <em>homo sapiens</em> juveniles are wrapping up their written observations of fellow primates. They circumnavigate cages for a final view, then at a prearranged signal from their leader reconvene in a tight circle. “We had two self-groomings and a scent-marking at 9:38,” offers Girl- Who-Ate-Twenty-Scoops-of-Ice-Cream. Others vocalize, chiming in. “Any mating behaviors?” asks the instructor.</p> <p>Fourteen adolescents eye each other sidewise. No mating behaviors. “Okay,” the teacher says. “Now go calculate a coefficient of reliability.”</p> <p>They head for the trailer at a trot.</p> <p>– Baerman M.B.A. ’90, whose gifts manifested late, is a North Carolina playwright and essayist.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 2011</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/giftedness-class.jpg" width="670" height="432" alt="Each summer, Duke’s Talent Identification Program brings some of the nation’s smartest teenagers to campus for a jump start on college-level coursework. But the most important thing they learn may be that they’re not alone." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501105 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/problem-giftedness#comments Gifted: Equity and Excellence https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/gifted-equity-and-excellence <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>One hears, on campus and beyond, a longing for more systemic innovation in secondary education—change that could perhaps build on the success of Duke’s Talent Identification Program (TIP).</p> <p>The American Association for Gifted Children (AAGC), a nonprofit housed at Duke and led by Margaret Gayle, has a “special emphasis on diverse populations and on those who have fewer financial resources.” With no formal relationship to TIP beyond awarding the Mary Jane and Jerome A. Straka Scholarship to help students participate in its programs, Gayle has been involved for a decade in Project Bright Idea, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and implemented through the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.</p> <p>Bright Idea teaches teachers to teach as if all children were gifted and talented, and its results suggest that students rise to meet expectations. That is, most can acquire gifted-learning behaviors such as concentration and perseverance and, when they do, they get better test scores.</p> <p>This spring, Gayle appeared on a webcast with Sanford School of Public Policy economist Sandy Darrity to discuss education reform generally and Project Bright Idea in particular. Darrity says, “To the extent that we treat kids as gifted selectively, we actually partition the quality of curriculum and instruction that kids get exposed to. And we disproportionately locate black and Latino kids in those environments where they get the ‘dumbed-down’ instruction.” He admitted he likes gifted curricula but not segmented gifted programs.</p> <p>Still, TIP is neither an instrument of public policy nor responsible for the state of the public schools. As TIP-based researcher Rick Courtright puts it, “There’s a difference between what TIP sets out to accomplish and what education sets out to accomplish.”</p> <p>Yet in the public mind, gifted children may seem already to have every advantage already, and affording them special treatment under the auspices of a private university that reaches out through (often) public schools may seem somehow undemocratic.</p> <p>“We don’t have a problem in this country with elitism in the arts,” notes Courtright. “We don’t have a problem in this country with elitism in business. We don’t have a problem with elitism in sports. We don’t worry that we don’t have demographic representation on our basketball teams or our football teams or our baseball teams. We go for those with the highest level of talent. The question is not whether elitism is good or bad; we want the best performance for everyone. What are the circumstances under which each person can maximize their potential to its greatest possible degree?</p> <p>“Elitism gets a bad rap. It becomes a proxy for people’s criticism of treating individuals differently, because historically some people have had privileges. The privileges are what get interpreted as elitism— privilege by birthright, by inheritance. We see it as a threat to our democracy when certain groups are identified for preferential treatment. In public institutions like public education, elitism is a dirty word. How that gets translated is, everybody has to stay rather low.</p> <p>“We [at TIP] talk about it all the time: There’s a conflict between equity and excellence. You want that excellence that leads to an elite level of performance— but you</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 2011</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501102 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/gifted-equity-and-excellence#comments String Theory https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/string-theory <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="media-h-credit">Four little boys with violins crowd onto stage left, forming a tight defensive phalanx, and the three young women who rise to play alongside them whisper to them to spread out. The tune is Dorothy Kitchen's "Hiding Song." The tiniest musician, who plays a quarter-size violin, follows with a solo on "Pop! Goes the Weasel." Yards away, looking enisled at center stage, pianist Sam Hammond '68, M.T.S. '96—best known as Duke's carillonneur—accompanies on a concert grand.</div> <p>The Duke University String School (DUSS) has begun its fourth and last concert of the spring season, some six hours of performing over the afternoon and evening that mark the school's fortieth anniversary. These four decades represent a signal milestone for the school's founder and director, Dorothy Kitchen—she of "Hiding Song" fame—and an invitation to reflect upon the future. Yet the marathon concert is neither unusual nor valedictory, just one more breathing place on the long upward path to helping the world play, and understand, music.</p> <p>"This school has seen thousands of people go through it, thousands," says Kitchen. "But the school just kind of happened. It was a necessity. When I came here, there was no string teaching—no string teaching done well—for children.</p> <p>"We're trying to teach them to read," she continues, "to play in tune, to play in a group, to have a sensitivity to rhythm, sensitivity to pitch, appreciation for sound, and an appreciation for the group experience."</p> <p>Kitchen teaches the beginners, like the four little boys who lead off the concert. Like the rest of DUSS students, "when they perform, it's amazing how well they do, the poise," says Shelley Livingston, assistant conductor of the string school's Youth Symphony Orchestra, the senior-most group.</p> <p>Presently, the diminutive but poised members of Beginner I Ensemble are whisked offstage to make way for Beginner II Ensemble, evenly split between boys and girls, who render a unison version of "Camptown Races" at about one-quarter tempo. Incredibly, they are in tune. Unlike their casually attired families in the audience, the performers are dressed in dapper white shirts and black trousers or skirts. Their collective bow is practiced. Teachers beam. Video cameras roll.</p> <p>Kitchen "demands discipline," says cellist and DUSS alumna Brenda Neece. She also commands respect. Whether eight-year-olds with twelve-inch fiddles or alumni thirty years out with professional careers in music, everybody calls the boss "Mrs. Kitchen."</p> <div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Amateur professionals: members of the DUSS Youth Symphony Orchestra, overleaf; Kitchen, conducting center, demands that her students approach music as a dedicated pursuit, not a recreational activity" src="/issues/091007/images/091007-lg-42duss0124.jpg" style="height:240px; width:580px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption">Amateur professionals: members of the DUSS Youth Symphony Orchestra, overleaf; Kitchen, conducting center, demands that her students approach music as a dedicated pursuit, not a recreational activity <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Kitchen, a violinist who holds degrees from Case Western Reserve and Brandeis universities and was associate concertmaster of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra for fifteen years, launched the string school in 1967 with Arlene di Cecco, then of the Ciompi Quartet. The school has grown from twenty-five students taking private lessons to more than 250 who study with eleven instructors, populate six orchestras and at least ten chamber groups, and learn music theory year-round.</p> <p>And it was, Kitchen is quick to add, the university affiliation that allowed people to take the school seriously. "The gift that Duke gives us is the use of the space, and the help of the secretarial staff to handle our budget and help us with employees." All direct expenses are covered by the school's tuition and fees—along with grants from the A.J. Fletcher Foundation that enable DUSS to offer need-based scholarships and pursue programs reaching deep into the Triangle community, especially Durham, where DUSS teachers have offered annual workshops. Every Saturday of the academic year, students pour onto campus from surrounding areas as well, including Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Apex, Burlington, Cary, Garner, Hillsborough, Oxford, and South Hill, Virginia.</p> <p>What makes DUSS unusual, says Livingston, is "the opportunity to study a high-level repertoire. It's exhilarating for them to play challenging music."</p> <p>"In high school they read the masters—James Joyce, Shakespeare," says Kitchen. "Why not do it in music?" DUSS orchestras are known for tackling tough works at their four annual concerts, and today's will be no exception. Its chamber-music groups, whose coaches are paid primarily though an endowment from the Dorothy Fearing family honoring the founder of the Duke Symphony Orchestra, perform at retirement villages, malls, Rotary and Kiwanis meetings, garden clubs, hospital fundraisers—wherever they find an audience, whenever their community needs them, and whatever they dare, from the great Romantics to living composers. Kitchen sees ensembles, not lessons, as the core of the school's program.</p> <p>"There's a kind of thrill that comes with making music with someone else," explains Jonathan Bagg, the Ciompi String Quartet's violist and a former DUSS parent and coach. "Mrs. Kitchen always recognizes that when people come together to make music, it's something that satisfies in a deep way."</p> <p>Inside the auditorium—its empty seats littered, though neatly so, with open violin, viola, and cello cases—a couple of hundred parents in sundresses and Capri pants, khakis and Hawaiian shirts fan themselves, babies in strollers look around expectantly, and siblings dangle bare feet in the aisles. A teenage violist klok-kloks by in noisy heels, conversations buzz from every quarter, the doors slam as children run in and out.</p> <p>David Ballantyne, a British radio announcer for WCPE, a local classical music station, has been tapped as emcee for the day. He had launched the Beginner I performance without much fanfare, except to acknowledge Mrs. Kitchen, who rose hastily to take a bow from the third row. But when the seventy-eight members of the formidable Intermediate I Orchestra rise from their places in the audience, the atmosphere changes. Coaches and teachers spring up and issue commands, chairs are dragged to and fro to accommodate sightlines, and the audience leans forward.</p> <p>The orchestra features one of its own in a Haydn concerto: Ten-year-old Michael Gao, a violinist in DUSS' most advanced ensemble, is also an award-winning pianist slated to perform in Carnegie Hall later this year. The reedy sixth-grader crosses the stage with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He has forgotten to button his cuffs, which have been hastily rolled back out of the way. He is so physically unprepossessing and so diminutive behind the grand piano that you find yourself wondering whether he can possibly have the strength to pull off a fortissimo.</p> <div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Boys with bows: violinists Adren Rigdon, left, and Daniel Lee, members of the DUSS Intermediate II Orchestra" src="/issues/091007/images/091007-lg-43duss0751.jpg" style="height:280px; width:580px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption">Boys with bows: violinists Adren Rigdon, left, and Daniel Lee, members of the DUSS Intermediate II Orchestra <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>You needn't have worried. He lights into his piece with vigor. In fact, if you close your eyes, you could be listening to a much older performer with a sophisticated sense of nuance, phrasing, timbre, and touch. Afterward, he bows twice, thrice, accepts a white rose with no evident surprise, shoves his free hand into his pocket and exits without having made eye contact with anyone. He has forgotten to acknowledge the orchestra, a breach of etiquette commensurate with his inexperience.</p> <p>The slighted orchestra acquits itself with honor in Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite—though a Beginner I violinist has fallen asleep in the back row of the auditorium—and there is a further distribution of flowers and praise, with a presentation to Kitchen of a handmade quilt signed by her students and a public reading of a letter of tribute from the North Carolina representative of the American String Teachers Association. Ballantyne mistakenly invites audience members to head for a reception at the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building, but the audience knows better. There is in fact no time for a reception, for the daylong concert is about to move into its second phase: performances by nine chamber ensembles.</p> <p>I ask the kids, always, ‘Which piece did you like best in our last concert?' " says Kitchen, sitting, weeks later, in her office in the basement of Biddle. She has the orator's knack of building a sense of drama into her conversation and speaks with palpable energy about what she calls students' "trajectory of excitement in music."</p> <p>"Not just the excitement of learning," she explains, "but the fact that music is a naturally occurring form of expression, and that you learn how to use it by the technique."</p> <p>Her office is bursting with stacks and racks and cabinets stuffed with sheet music ("Originally it was just piles"), old concert posters, a watercolor ("That's a picture of me teaching, oh, many, many, many years ago"). It's summer, and although Saturdays are a little quieter, the stacks of music are not gathering any dust. DUSS has begun preparing for its two summer chamber music camps, for which it stopped advertising years ago because there was just too much interest. Demand had to be controlled by limiting applications to those in the know.</p> <p>Kitchen describes herself as partially retired but quickly adds, "I cannot imagine that I would ever stop teaching. I'm happy with what I do."</p> <p>&nbsp;"There's no next Dorothy," says DUSS assistant director Stephanie Swisher, director of the beginning ensembles and conductor of the Intermediate II Orchestra, a full-time DUSS employee who has been with the school for twelve years.</p> <p>One of the things that has made the program so successful—and that will make replacing her difficult—is her philosophy that the teaching staff should be given plenty of latitude. "We have a good deal of autonomy," says Swisher. "At the same time, Mrs. Kitchen's very helpful in working with us, giving us feedback whenever we need it. She's been a mentor to me."</p> <p>"I have a couple of really strong teachers," says Kitchen, "who are also really good organizers, and who also have generosity of spirit. We've been trying to create a base of people who are interested in the forward motion of the student, as opposed to their forward motion." Asked whether she watches the teachers teach, she instantly responds, "No, I watch the students learn." She is confident that DUSS will continue if she ever retires. "And you can't say, ‘Well, it'll be better next year,' " Kitchen says. "You have to say, ‘This is what I'm going to do now.' And so, in a way, success is having a continued now."</p> <p>The school's ongoing success has led to comparisons with conservatories. Kitchen characterizes it as "a mini-conservatory based on the New England Conservatory of Music model." By definition that would limit it to the elite, inviting comparison to tennis camps where hard-driving parents send prepubescent prodigies in the pursuit of fame.</p> <p>But there's something different going on here—a sense of creative tension between ambition and fun. "There's no audition process," says Kitchen. "If you want to study the violin, you study." But, she adds, make no mistake: "This is a school; it's not a place where you're coming to do a recreational activity on Saturday mornings. Our primary purpose is not enjoyment. It's learning."</p> <p>Unlike the vast majority of conservatories, DUSS is not competitive. The orchestras, for example, do have principal players in each section, but they rotate. "The people who are soloing are not necessarily gifted," explains Kitchen. "They are competent or hard working or interested. When you have faith that they can come through, they come through."</p> <p>The evening concert, featuring the Intermediate II Orchestra and the Youth Symphony Orchestra, is festive. A photo collage and poster in the lobby proclaims "Mrs. Kitchen/DUSS 40th Anniversary!" It's almost a full house now (if you include the violin cases), and the auditorium feels more welcoming than in the stark daylight, its dome tastefully lit, and the evening air cooler. Surprisingly, the house lights never go down, perhaps in testament to the fact that the parents, alumni, and siblings in the audience have made as many sacrifices as the performers themselves to create this moment, and so, in a sense, it is their performance, too.</p> <p>Kitchen is more in evidence tonight than during the day. She is the general directing her troops, which include the audience. She waves to indicate chair placement, issuing commands and marshaling her lieutenants with a practiced air. As the evening goes on, she periodically seizes the microphone from the emcee. "I want you to clap for these kids like crazy," she says after one piece. "I think they deserve another round of applause," after another. "Stand, Bill!" to composer William Robinson after a third.</p> <div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"> <div> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Musical acclaim: Kitchen receives bouquets and applause from admirers " src="/issues/091007/images/091007-lg-44strings0083.jpg" style="height:290px; width:580px" /> <p><span style="font-size:10px">Musical acclaim: Kitchen receives bouquets and applause from admirers</span></p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>She proves a deft conductor, using just her right hand at first, the baton balanced between index finger and thumb, until she needs to call forth a crescendo, jab an accent, or perform an arabesque cutoff. But the hands are only the beginning. Her style is exaggerated, a whole-body approach. "When you're standing up in front of an orchestra of eighty or ninety teenagers," says Jonathan Bagg, "you gotta put out a lot of energy. She knows what's important in a performance, which is the emotional. Underlying a great piece of music is something powerful, and she wants the students to recognize and get that."</p> <p>"Children sing before they talk," says Kitchen, "so that has to say something about the value of music to a human being." After one work, she blows the orchestra an audible kiss before applause can begin.</p> <p>While she may at times play the general, Kitchen is the embodiment of Tough Musical Love. "Go to a rehearsal," says Bagg, "Listen to her talking to the orchestra and working them up so they really understand what the music that they're playing is capable of, and what they're capable of when they play it."</p> <p>"I was always terrified of Mrs. Kitchen," confesses Brenda Neece, now an adjunct assistant professor in the music department and curator of the Duke University Musical Instrument Collection. Neece—Dorothy Kitchen insists on calling her Doctor Neece —still keeps a copy of the DUSS twentieth-anniversary program from 1987, in which she performed. "The cello is my life, so of course the string school was important. I tell my students just to do what she says, shape up, behave. They can't be as slack as they are with me." (This from a teacher who ends one-hour lessons after fifteen minutes if she finds out her student hasn't practiced.)</p> <p>"She knows how to challenge each student in the right way to get the best out of them," Neece continues. "It's really about the music."</p> <p>"What she likes least," adds Bagg, "is a student who appears to be sleepwalking through his lesson or rehearsal, people who would turn off their brains and go on autopilot. That would get her angry."</p> <p>"Each lesson is actually hard," acknowledges Kitchen, "because you're driving toward something new. The lesson is not&nbsp;<br /> for your comfort zone.&nbsp; If you're tired at the end, that's normal." She grins. "So I provide chocolate."</p> <p>Toward the end, tonight's program evolves into something of a family affair. Kitchen's son, Nicholas, a world-class violinist; his wife, cellist Yeesun Kim; and their colleagues from the Borromeo String Quartet join the ranks of the Youth Symphony Orchestra for Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence. "I wondered what would happen if we triggered them with these brilliant players in their midst," Kitchen later chuckles.</p> <p>What happened was "amazing," she says. "It just turned them on. And all the work that they had done just coalesced." The visiting professionals play a movement from a Brahms double concerto with the orchestra, then an Elgar quartet during which the members of the orchestra remain rapt, motionless—their bows, their feet, even their eyes.</p> <p>For an audience to get to watch, closely, as musicians listen to other musicians is a rare accident. Not stirring, not counting, they seem lost in thought even at their tender age, with not only a heightened sense of discrimination but of imagination. These ten-, twelve-, fourteen-year-olds are not just modeling good behavior; it's easy to see that they are moved by this string quartet, which the Boston Globe described as "simply the best there is." It is startling.</p> <p>The standing ovation begins with the children themselves and quickly infects their parents. The presence of a talent like Nicholas Kitchen, himself of course a DUSS graduate, shows that skill is a continuum, that every musician was once a beginner. "Gifts are not things that you earn," as Dorothy Kitchen once told NPR, "but if they're yours, then it's your job to use them." As if to drive the point home, her four-year-old grandson comes out attired in a white linen suit to play a 20-second micro-performance. The room bursts into friendly applause.</p> <p>At the close of the concert,&nbsp; there are, inevitably, speeches,and a mayoral proclamation, as well as a letter from Dean of the Humanities for Arts &amp; Sciences Gregson Davis and an engraved crystal token of appreciation from the music department. One of Kitchen's first students, Beth Levine, presents her with a fat scrapbook of clippings and remembrances recalling DUSS' hosting of an orchestra from Port-au-Prince, Haiti; an exchange program with the Laredo Institute of Cochabamba, Bolivia; work (and play) with a music school in Cork, Ireland; and DUSS students' 1993 candlelight performance in the White House.</p> <p>Only once is Kitchen at a loss for words: when Livingston presents a $5,000-plus check, the gift of appreciative parents and alumni, that will enable her to travel to overseas music festivals and even fly up to Washington for Nicholas' performance at the Library of Congress on an eighteenth-century Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù violin.</p> <p>"People," she gasps, "this is above—this is amazing." She stammers, pauses, then gathers herself and announces, "And now … we're going to play the Bach Double!"</p> <p>At her signal, DUSS alumni rise as one from the audience and, bearing their instruments, advance toward the stage. Additional stands are magically produced, but as there is no room onstage—the youth symphony alone has 115 members—they take up positions in what would otherwise be called the orchestra pit. There has been no rehearsal, but everyone is game for a round of sight-reading. They have some sense, after all, of how to read, to play in tune and in a group, to have a sensitivity to rhythm and pitch, an appreciation for sound and the group experience.</p> <p>A violin materializes in Kitchen's hands. She raises her bow, nods, and&nbsp; the whole room erupts into the vivace from Bach's Double Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, with Dorothy and Nicholas Kitchen standing alone together at center stage as if in a spotlight all their own.</p> <p>Mother and son take the solos.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Baerman M.B.A. '90, the marketing director for Duke Corporate Education, is an oboist and is married to a former DUSS teacher.<br /> <br /> Darnofall, a marketing assistant at Duke Corporate Education, has a degree in journalism and mass communication.</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2007-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Monday, October 1, 2007</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/091007-lg-40duss0153.jpg" width="620" height="284" alt="Amateur professionals: members of the DUSS Youth Symphony Orchestra, overleaf; Kitchen, conducting center, demands that her students approach music as a dedicated pursuit, not a recreational activity" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/magazine/writers/molly-darnofall" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Molly Darnofall</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2007" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2007</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The Duke University String School, led by Dorothy Kitchen, has been introducing young people to the joys of the violin, viola, cello, and bass for four decades.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 01 Oct 2007 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500910 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/string-theory#comments Signature Hancock https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/signature-hancock <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Herbie Hancock uses his hands and feet when he talks. When he says the word guitar, his hands strum an imaginary Fender. When he says record, his finger makes a needle and spins. Meanwhile he paces, gravitating back toward the piano keyboard again and again, though he doesn't touch it. He walks partway around the big Steinway grand. Lightly strokes its raised lid. Sits on the bench. Home base.</p> <p>They call this a lecture, but it's more like free association, an aural tease. Hancock, after all, is no academic. He's a jazz pianist--perhaps the archetypal jazz pianist. His publicity trumpets him as "a true icon of modern music." At Duke for two days this fall to offer his own brand of lecture, concert, and public master class, he brushes past swarms of True Believers who descend upon him whenever he emerges on campus from a campus doorway.</p> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="10" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 375px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Being there, doing that: Herbie Hancock" src="/issues/030404/images/lg_1046034-8hancock_lect.jpg" style="height:543px; width:375px" /> <p>&nbsp;Being there, doing that: Herbie Hancock</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Bebop, hard bop, free jazz, modal jazz, fusion, funk, R&amp;B--he's done it all, and some of it he helped invent. In fifty-some years on stage, he's gigged with all the cats from Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to Wynton Marsalis and Kathleen Battle. A natural tinkerer, he introduced electronic keyboards and other radical innovations to the jazz mainstream, driving techies crazy at each step by asking the questions they dreaded in the early days: Hey, can this synthesizer thing sample a sound? Could it be portable? Can you make it record and play back? Why not a polyphonic synthesizer so I could play more than one note? The official Herbie Hancock website features a huge section on technology--"immersive mixing," "multi-angle surround sound"--and plentiful links to vendors.</p> <p>And so perhaps it's only natural that Hancock's visit to campus be co-hosted by the Pratt School of Engineering (along with the Institute of the Arts, the Onstage Committee of the Duke University Union, and the music department). It is engineering dean Kristina Johnson who introduces him at this lecture, held in Reynolds Auditorium on the afternoon of his second day at Duke. She mentions his eight Grammys, his Academy Award, his role in popularizing electronic instruments, and what she calls "the intimate relationship between music and electrical engineering." (The school's namesake, Edmund T. Pratt Jr. B.S.E.E. '47, was, after all, a jazz trumpet player.)</p> <p>Because Hancock's official bio says he double-majored in music and electrical engineering, Johnson gives The Master a quick engineering test on the formula for resonance, intended to set up a complimentary metaphor--but he blows it, hastening to explain that he was only in a pre-engineering program, and just for a couple of years before deciding on a music-composition major. "Once an E.E., always an E.E.," the dean says brightly, and hands him a Duke cap.</p> <p>Who is this guy, really? Gone are the bright floral shirts of yesteryear, gone the Afro and the hip goatee that were his signature look in the Sixties. From a distance, with his close-cropped hair and restrained, good-natured demeanor, you think for a second he might be somebody's uncle, the kind of gent who would drive a nice, clean, eight-cylinder Olds and always change the oil on schedule. Yet there's a Puckish gleam in his eye, a carefully controlled perpetual motion in those restless hands. This is not your father's Oldsmobile.</p> <p>He tells the lecture audience about working on the 1966 soundtrack for Blowup with director Michelangelo Antonioni, one of many mentors. "He knew who all the cats were," Hancock says. "After dinner one night, he said, 'There's no such thing as art: There's only this painting, that film, this music.' It made sense." Hancock leans on the piano again, as though it might vouch for him. "'I just put events together,' Antonioni told me. 'However people interpret it is right.'" Hancock pauses. "My music is the same way."</p> <p>The truth is that before you get to hear Herbert Jeffrey Hancock whole, before you can really listen with what E. E. Cummings called the "ears of your ears," you have to get past Herbie the Superstar. You've got to recognize that this icon is an iconoclast.</p> <p>Iconoclasts are nothing if not confident. Responding to a disparaging question about "electronica"--music like techno and trip-hop--he explains, "I don't look at a genre and judge it. I listen to a piece. I don't evaluate things according to whether they 'have soul.' If you decide you want to do music that sounds cold, that's a reflection of our world--it's not good or bad."</p> <p>In the forefront of world culture, technology, business, and music," exults Hancock's bio. While he's lecturing, his cell phone rings, and this wizard on the forefront of world culture and technology bungles the call, hanging up while trying to answer. Evidently used to this, his daughter calls back. It's her birthday, and soon Hancock has the whole audience singing "Happy Birthday" into his mobile phone. The man sees no difference between improvising on stage and improvising in life.</p> <p>Despite the hoopla about his cutting-edge work with electronic keyboards, synthesizers, sound sampling, and more, technology clearly delights Hancock as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.</p> <p>He remembers when Miles Davis, with whom he famously played in the Sixties, got him to try the Fender electric piano for the first time: "I could turn up the volume so I could be just as loud as the drummer!" he chortles. After all these years, you still sense his childlike delight in machines, even purely mechanical ones like the Steinway in front of him.</p> <p>"When you hit this key, there's an incredible series of cause and effect before you hear a sound," he says. "Even though you're so far removed from what's happening, you can have an emotional impact...." He touches a key tenderly, and holds it. "I've been playing since I was seven," he says finally, "and now I'm sixty-three, and it's been a long journey. Synthesizers are really still in their infancy; I can express myself better on this."</p> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="10" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img alt="Being there, doing that: Herbie Hancock" src="/issues/030404/images/lg_1046034-8hancock_qua_.jpg" style="height:501px; width:375px" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td>Being there, doing that: Herbie Hancock</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Later that evening, John Brown, visiting director of the Jazz Studies program, welcomes us back to Reynolds for the master class, in which Hancock will publicly critique the performance of local students. "I struggle with how to introduce a person who needs no introduction," he says. "We truly are in the presence of a legend."</p> <p>"All right!" a voice screams, and the audience erupts with applause. Aficionados abound: teens hoarding the posters they've torn down in the lobby; expressionless men in black dress shirts, black trousers, black shoes. But it's a mixed crowd. The youngest fan present is a little skeptic in a floral T-shirt, very verbal--and she brought coloring books just in case. When Hancock won his last three Grammy Awards for the 1998 album Gershwin's World, she hadn't been born.</p> <p>The program refers to tonight's intergenerational attraction as "An Open Workshop"; Hancock calls it a "show." The show nominally belongs to the student combos Brown has put together this semester: electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, biomedical engineers, physicists, and chemists who play for fun--and, lest listeners get the wrong impression, a public-policy major, a political science major, and a couple of grad students, including a Ph.D. candidate from the B-school--jamming alongside first-years and alumni who have lingered in the Triangle.</p> <p>The players launch out, their music pleasant, their solos classic and controlled. The pianist, Jules van Binsbergen, the Fuqua student, watches his own hands intently; all the musicians avoid eye contact. As the horns in their dapper business suits pass calculated riffs forth and back, they could be at a particularly grim job interview instead of wailing for a high-spirited crowd of Herbievores. After a couple of tunes, they stop, and Hancock rises from his seat in the fifth row to mount the stage.</p> <p>"Look, it's a conversation," Hancock tells the combo with a wave of his hand. "Just because one guy has a solo at the moment doesn't mean the rest of you have to lie back. You could be swapping ideas in the background--a kind of call and response.</p> <p>"And each of you has an individual story that you're telling with your instrument. What makes a small group fun is when each person is listening to what the other musicians are doing, and asks, What can I do that can have a shape?"</p> <p>He sits at the keyboard and demonstrates. Suddenly van Binsbergen grins: Those syncopated chords could follow their own imperative and might push the envelope without treading on the saxophone soloist's toes. "The piano," Hancock assures him, "is actually an orchestra. So, hey, you could have a flute line going." His right hand wanders playfully up and up and up the keyboard. (He knows something about orchestras: His first public performance was a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony at age eleven.)</p> <p>Now the bass player is grinning, too, and he plucks experimentally as Hancock tries a countermelody. The Master turns to the drummer. "Things can happen in those little stops," he tells him. "You're so polite. Don't always wait for the end of the phrase--give the soloist a little kick in the behind!"</p> <p>The group takes up Thelonious Monk's "Ruby, My Dear," and, sure enough, the drummer gives the bass an aural kick in the behind during his solo. The bass player smiles angelically. Van Binsbergen and trumpeter Roger Diebold, a Pratt School sophomore, listen to each other more closely now, teasing and tossing each other intervals, rhythms: copying, varying, daring. A game of tag gets going; people nod. When they finish, Hancock jumps up. "That trumpet solo was great--it had a storyline! That's hard to do--make a complete statement instead of just following the changes."</p> <p>The changes are the harmonic progression, a song's structural skeleton, and every jazz improviser first learns how to follow them intelligently before learning how to subvert them creatively. Miles Davis long ago had advised Hancock to avoid the "butter notes"--the fat, obvious tones such as the third or seventh of the chord. The result: One listener likened a Hancock accompaniment of a Miles Davis trumpet solo to hearing a double concerto--two melodic lines intertwined in an aural double-helix.</p> <p>Later, Hancock bluntly tells another student pianist, freshman Pulsar Li, that his accompanying skills need work. "You play a lot of roots"--the bottom note of the chord--"but the bass is already doing that stuff. The things you put in your right hand you could put in your left, and do different things with your right, for color." In some of his recordings, Hancock favored right-hand improvisations so strongly that he eliminated the left hand on solos, leaving the rhythm section to take care of infrastructure.</p> <p>He tells saxophonist Eric Diebold, a Pratt School senior, "You're ready for Jazz 102," then plops down and works out an example from Sonny Rollins' "Doxy," which they have just performed. "Instead of C7 going to G7, I played C-sharp minor," Hancock says. "You can do that! It sounds dissonant, but because it resolves to the same place...." He plays it, and Diebold nods. "And here, if you start from a B-flat 7th chord, go up a minor third, up a minor third, up a minor third--the roots all relate to each other."</p> <p>But he turns and apologizes, first to the players, then the audience. "I was just talking about technique. That's craft. I don't want to leave you with craft. I want to leave you with feeling." He gropes for another way to say it. "Music is not about music. Music is about life. Yeah, right now you got to learn the mechanics. There's a thing called scales that go with certain chords. Sometimes there's a tendency for musicians to surround themselves with music and have that be the center of their life. But your life is about more than music."</p> <p>To trombonist Jillian Smith, a freshman: "You're also someone's daughter, friend, maybe one day a mother. Bring that to your playing. The goal is to make magic happen--magic that instills hope--and build something in this strange but common language we call music."</p> <p>The crowd turns pensive, thoughtful, silent..</p> <div> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Jamming: Hancock, above, takes over at the the keyboard to demonstrate a point" src="/issues/030404/images/lg_1046034-8hancock_183.jpg" style="height:266px; width:580px" /> <p>&nbsp;Jamming: Hancock, above, takes over at the the keyboard to demonstrate a point</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>The night before, when Hancock's own combo took the stage by storm, it was anything but. In front of an audience of graying hipsters in dashikis, pasty-faced preppies in rugby shirts, earnest black guys in white, earnest white guys in black, music faculty members, townies, and students, Hancock and his acoustic quartet played to a packed and noisily happy Page Auditorium.</p> <p>It starts like this: Hancock reminisces about a 1996 gig in India when time stopped as he fell off a nine-foot platform. "Never did get to see the Taj," he reflects sadly. "Had to go to the hospital." You can tell the idea of stopping time appeals to him.</p> <p>Behind him, a thin, young African American rests his hand on a tenor sax, impassive; a bald, lanky, middle-aged bassist dons his steel specs to check a chord progression on a scrap of paper. The drummer, a woman with the high forehead of a deep thinker (later you find out she received a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music--at age eleven), smiles at the boss when he warns, "We're going to do a lot of crazy things over the next hour and a half. Improvisation doesn't always stick to the clocks that we humans have set."</p> <p>The group prepares to begin with Cole Porter's "I Love You," after one further admonition from Hancock, who tells the audience, chuckling, "We doctored it up and changed it a bit. You're going to get it our way."</p> <p>A ribbon of song peels off the tenor sax, then a piano riff and an accelerando, and they hit their groove, zero to sixty in five seconds. On the piano solo, the sax man wanders off into the darkness, and Hancock sits coolly, his hands not rising far, his feet pumping without ostentation. There are funny moments of walking bass and broken octaves reminiscent of W.C. Handy (sometimes he does use that left hand after all), now and then a flash of Bill Evans.</p> <p>Yet the music is anything but allusive; melodies get only a pro forma nod. The tenor reappears from the darkness of the wings, and the combo ramps from straight ahead to edgy. Competing for our attention with the soloist, Hancock bursts into jagged chords, then just as suddenly lays out. A performer moans; the bass explores a dampened pizzicato against the short sharp prick of the snare drum, the muffled whoop of the high-hat, the punctus of the bell. Back again, the piano inserts vertical bursts of phrase, takes over, toys with the drum set like a cat working a mouse, mocks the sax as they jointly search for a single note, the accent that says it all. They find it, and Hancock shouts "Yeah!" on a falling cadence, drawing out the note.</p> <p>Then they are on fire, wrapping us in sheet after sheet of frantic sound, the bassist dancing with his instrument--or rather dancing around it, as if it were a maypole and he a Dionysian reveler. Now Hancock's shoulders are writhing in time to the music, on the off beats, and we're getting a tour de force--100 years of jazz history compressed into a single tune, and that tune is compressed into a single barbaric utterance, a short sharp bark that somehow relaxes into a balladic stanza, eerie as the lights go from blue to pomegranate red. And the song ends.</p> <p>Herbie Hancock laughs gleefully. Afterward someone in the lobby remarks, "Could you believe how quiet his hands were?"</p> <p>Jazz," he tells the master class the next day, "is about trying to make everyone sound as good as they can. As a pianist, my job is to make them sound better--it's not about competition but teamwork. As time goes on, I find myself less judgmental about other members of the band. Whatever somebody else plays, you try to make it sound right."</p> <p>He surveys the young musicians. "The less judgmental we become, the freer we become." Beat. "But this is your stage, not mine."</p> <p>Abruptly, he exits.</p> <p><em>Baerman M.B.A. '90, special assistant to the president, studied oboe at the Eastman School of Music.</em></p> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, March 31, 2004</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_1046034-8hancock_183.jpg" width="620" height="284" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The jazz pianist and icon lectures, teaches, and performs--for True Believers and neophytes alike.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 31 Mar 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502341 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/signature-hancock#comments Books: September-October 2003 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-september-october-2003 <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong>Hunting Midnight<br /> By Richard Zimler '77.<br /> Delacorte Press, 2003.<br /> 512 pages. $24.95.</strong></td> <td><strong>Last of the Amazons<br /> By Steven Pressfield '65.<br /> Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 2003.<br /> 416 pages. $13.95, paper.</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p><img alt="Hunting Midnight" src="/issues/091003/images/lg_zimlerbookcover.jpg" style="float:left; height:246px; width:175px" /><img alt="" src="/dukemag/images/dropcap/h.gif" style="float:left; height:27px; width:25px" /> unting Midnight is the story of "a Portuguese-Scottish Jew who was raised in an atheist household believing he was a Christian by birth and whose most beloved friend was an African Bushman." Phew. Spanning the years 1798 to 1825 and set mostly in Portugal and the United States, this novel would be dubbed a bildungsroman, were it not that the narrator sounds pretty much the same at seven years old as he does at thirty-five.</p> <p>At all ages that narrator, one John Zarco Stewart, can be melodramatic, cryptic, long-winded, even maudlin: "I had yet to learn that we do not always receive keys to the rooms we inherit," explains the ten-year-old. "Now I would have to grope forward into a future that was never meant to be," he reports at eleven. "In great danger of fainting, I risked everything by pressing my lips to hers," at twenty-one, and so on.</p> <p>We put up with him to find out what happens next. Indeed, he is forever pressing his lips, endeavoring to find meaning, having many a dream, or finding himself at the mercy of his emotions. This habit of diction may be an attempt to sound authentic (Did people really talk that way?), but it can cloy. Zimler is not a stylist but a raconteur.</p> <p>A pretty good raconteur, in fact. The story rolls along with its own telos, and even John's goody-goody pontifications--he's a moralist, not a thinker--sidetrack it only briefly.</p> <p>The novel falls neatly into twin halves. In the first part, John comes of age as a secret Jew in a barely post-Inquisition Portugal. He encounters and comes to love the title character, known as Tsamma in Africa, Midnight in Europe, and Samuel in the U.S. This Bushman healer and hunter, wise beyond his years, has been stolen and freed from his master in southern Africa by John's father. On his arrival in Europe, Midnight disconcerts his hostess with a traditional Bush greeting: "Good day, Mrs. Stewart. We saw you from afar and are dying of hunger." This hyperbole recurs throughout the narrative, each time gaining sweetness and depth from its context.</p> <p>John goes on to witness the sad decay of his parents' marriage. To his dismay--and ours--Midnight subsequently disappears for nineteen years and 300 pages, sold back into slavery, as it turns out, by John's father, whom he has cuckolded. The second half of the book, after his father's death, concerns itself with John's long search to recover and liberate Midnight from an American plantation.</p> <p>On all continents, John Stewart is a stranger in a strange land, comfortably wealthy and white but spiritually ill-equipped. His quest for Midnight is not only an effort to right a wrong and forgive a betrayal but also a search for personal wholeness.</p> <p>If this were primarily a historical epic, as the jacket asserts, the characters would be as obsessed with current events as they are with one another, and they would be presented as either more fully representative of their time or more clearly silhouetted against a historical backdrop. True, historical events intrude half-heartedly here and there, as when Napoleon invades Portugal--primarily to create a way for the narrator's father to die defending his city.</p> <p>Neither is the book quite at ease as romantic psychodrama, though it offers interesting and unexpected hints, for example, in the parallels between John's mother--a Portuguese Jewess who was raped by her piano teacher and who takes an African as her lover--and John's true love, Violeta, who is raped by her uncle and becomes a New York prostitute. But it's Midnight who animates the book and gives it a soul. "Africa is memory," he tells John. He does not mean he misses it; he means it is a physical landscape that gives substance to the memory of the human race, an objective correlative for the Spiritus Mundi. Africa is the home of love and fear. Decades later, he names his only child Memoria. "You might lose yourself if you say no to the night inside you too often," he teaches her. (Only the most finicky reader would point out that Midnight himself seems to have said "yes" once too often.) As John is advised by another black friend, "You eat the night, child. Eat the night deep inside you."</p> <p>Writing Midnight's powerful descriptions of nature, Bush religion, and slavery must have been hard, gratifying work. Enslavement, Midnight explains, is like being given a stone every day by your owner. First you fill your pockets, then, stone by stone, with nowhere else to put them, your mouth, your belly. One day your spirit lies down, sickened and overcome with heaviness, and as more stones accumulate and you can eat no more, you are slowly buried alive.</p> <p>His daughter puts it more simply: "Just for once I wished I had the power to say no. When I got the right to say that one simple word up North, I didn't know if I was ever going to say yes to anything ever again."</p> <p>Midnight is said to look like Pan: No wonder his evocative pantheism is catching, finally providing the clues that will help John sort out his tangled roots. "Genesis and Exodus are taking place inside us all at this very moment," says John at last. "Even Christ's Passion." And he reminds us that he carries Midnight's god, Mantis, between his toes.</p> <p>Yet religion is secondary in the end. The burning themes to which the plot repeatedly returns are those of memory and betrayal. When Memoria--Morri--refuses to leave the wounded John behind during her escape from the plantation, she tells her friends, "He may be a white man, but he's got a memory." That redeems him--and her. Africa is memory, Morri is memory, and John seeks to heal memory by hunting Midnight. One thinks of Carlos Fuentes' great line, "Memory is desire satisfied."</p> <p>As Midnight/Tsamma/Samuel grapples with the fact of slavery, he writes, "I can see now the nature of this evil.... It is a forgetfulness of all the stories of the world." Says Morri when they finally reach New York, "Everything had always been waiting."</p> <p>Thus it is that John himself so determinedly preserves his own story. Granted, he might have preserved less of it: An appropriately ruthless revision could have transformed an entertaining 500-page novel into a gripping 300-page novel. One feels guilty for mentioning that only in the postscript is John at last reunited with Midnight; but you must understand, we had seen him from afar and were dying of hunger.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr /> <p>--Paul Baerman<br /> Baerman M.B.A.'90 is a frequent contributor to the magazine.</p> </td> <td> <p><img alt="Last of the Amazons" src="/issues/091003/images/lg_lastoftheamazons.jpg" style="float:left; height:263px; width:175px" /><img alt="" src="/dukemag/images/dropcap/n.gif" style="float:left; height:27px; width:25px" />The most difficult aspect of writing historical fiction is maintaining the balance between the overarching perspective of the historical period and the delicate details of the characters' lives. Too often characters get lost amid the guns, battles, and various political changes that swirl about them, and the reader gets lost as well. Without an emotional core, these types of books collapse under endless paragraphs of historical minutia. A delicate touch is required, and Steven Pressfield's newest novel Last of the Amazons pulls off the feat.</p> <p>The story of the Amazons is a staple of Greek mythology. A band of all-female warriors, they were renowned for their ferocious and merciless behavior on the battlefield. Many men tried to "tame" them only to end up dead, their scalps hanging from the belts of the Amazons, symbols of the women's indefatigable fight against male domination. Perhaps the best-known story concerning these female warriors is the myth of Theseus and Antiope, Queen of the Amazons (in some versions Hippolyta takes the place of Antiope). Finding themselves shipwrecked, Theseus and his crew soon discover they have landed in the Amazon port of Mound City. In his travels, Theseus had hoped to bypass these warriors, but fate would have it differently. He and his men are stunned when they first encounter these women: "As a domestic dog looks a certain way and acts a certain way and yields in a certain way to a man, so does the race of domesticated women look and act and yield. These females, the ones before us now, were as wolves to such dogs. They were wild.... One felt as he might coming face-to-face with a she-bear or a lioness."</p> <p>What follows is, as they say, the stuff of legend. The Athenians and Amazons band together to defeat a gang of marauders, Theseus and Antiope fall in love, he spirits her back to Athens, a humiliated Amazon nation marches to Athens, and a horrific battle ensues.</p> <p>Told in flashbacks, Last of the Amazons alternates between two stories. One concerns the hunt for an Athenian girl, Europa, who has run off with her Amazon governess, Selene. During the search for Europa, the story of the great battle between the Athenians and the Amazons is told by alternating voices, that of Selene and Damon. Damon is Europa's uncle and a sympathizer with the Amazon's cause. He was also Selene's lover. The search for Europa becomes ultimately a quest into the past, a journey to uncover the last remnants of a once glorious civilization.</p> <p>Damon and Selene provide the emotional center of the novel, and Last of the Amazons is at its strongest when focusing on their story. Amid the contentiousness of the Athenian and Amazon camps, these two find love. Yet they also embody the conflict inherent in contrasting cultures: matriarchal versus patriarchal and rural versus urban. While not exactly the caliber of Romeo and Juliet, Damon and Selene provide the perfect counterweight to the mythic story of Theseus and Antiope. Damon and Selene are not the stuff of legend; they are the stuff of everyday life. Their struggles between allegiance to country and loyalty to heart resonate through all time periods and lend Last of the Amazons its strongest moments.</p> <p>But this work should not be confused with Bridget Jones's Diary or the latest Danielle Steel novel. This is not "chick-lit." Admirers of Pressfield's earlier books, especially Tides of War and Gates of Fire, will be happy to know that the driving force behind this book remains its battle sequences. The tension and anticipation of battle are perfectly rendered: "They bitched and spat and hammered each other's leather tight to their shoulders; men bound each other's shins and passed the whetstone down the line." Warriors are impaled, limbs are hacked off, boiling tar is poured on foes--the atrocities of war expertly delineated.</p> <p>Pressfield, though, does have a tendency to be too enthusiastic in his description of the fighting: "His head bowled rearward like a field ball, wide-eyed and gushing marrow at the base, and quashed on the stone with the sound of a dropped melon." This reviewer can do without these grisly details.</p> <p>Last of the Amazons suffers most when it strives for the mythic. The writing can get bogged down in its pseudo-Homeric style, and there are moments when the dialogue goes from descriptive to overblown: A dead body is described as a "life-fled form"; when Europa has her first period, she tells her sister, "I bleed woman's blood." At moments like these, when Pressfield tries to bring an epic tone to his story, the writing becomes clumsy and overdone. He is at his best when describing the simple act of an Amazon preparing her horse for battle or the conflict between head and heart.</p> <p>But these lapses can be forgiven. Pressfield weaves an engaging and compelling story, bringing an unusual perspective to a well-known tale.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr /> <p>--David Martin<br /> Martin, a freelance book reviewer, works for Penguin Putnam.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, October 1, 2003</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/magazine/writers/david-martin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David Martin</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 01 Oct 2003 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501758 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-september-october-2003#comments Publishing, Not Perishing https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/publishing-not-perishing <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p>You might imagine that running a university press would be like playing the stock market, angling for the big win: You patiently invest in scholars, waiting for the one book that will take the intellectual marketplace by storm, dictate a new wave of public policy, or anticipate the next Big Idea.</p> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="4" style="width:206px"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 317px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Books aplenty: press director Cohn, left, and editor-in-chief Wissoker" src="/issues/050603/images/lg_KUK_18.jpg" style="height:470px; width:317px" /> <p>&nbsp;Books aplenty: press director Cohn, left, and editor-in-chief Wissoker.&nbsp;photo: Chris Hildreth</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Actually, looking after a press is more like portfolio management, according to Ken Wissoker, editor-in-chief of Duke University Press. "We don't even think very much about each book's individual performance; we think about the performance of the entire list," he says. "There's so much risk assessment involved in publishing."</p> <p>Careful cost-benefit analysis yields a product mix that includes books with the power to influence a generation of thinkers and public intellectuals; others that break new ground within a narrow specialty much too important to ignore but much too complex for the common reader; and still others that will find their voice speaks loudest in classrooms. Oh, and, of course, there's the occasional work that falls flat on its face.</p> <p>This balancing act has a strong entrepreneurial theme. Editors try to identify hot new talent before anyone else does, to recognize the still untenured hero of the next generation of grad students. The players in this market never strike it rich, yet, as on Wall Street, they can still lose big.</p> <p>Some have, and the way is fraught with peril for the 120 or so remaining North American university presses. The same nonprofit publishers who for so long have kept the machinery running to disseminate new knowledge have been squeezed by spiraling costs, tightening demand, too much or too little specialization, buyer price sensitivity, big advances, the disappearance of the independent bookstore, bottlenecks in ever-narrower distribution channels, mergers and acquisitions--the economy, stupid.</p> <p>Still, after threatening to crash and burn a scant decade ago, Duke University Press has engineered its way to a trajectory that may keep it aloft through the current hard times. Canny strategic decisions and pride in its deep roots have nourished it, feeding an eagerness to send out new shoots even as financial exigencies kept the old growth pruned back.</p> <img alt="The Mexico Reader" src="/issues/050603/images/lg_KUK_19.jpg" style="float:left; height:275px; width:250px" /> <p>The press has never been one to shy from a good fight. Back when its parent institution was still called Trinity College, one of its first books--the 1924 An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, edited by a Trinity professor--daringly introduced many readers to the likes of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson. Nearly seventy years later, press leaders again placed a bold bet, this time on cultural studies--the field of interdisciplinary scholarship that looks at art and literature, law and the sciences, history, and gender and race through a social and political lens. Think multiculturalism, emerging disciplines, gay and lesbian studies: high potential, high risk. They hedged their investment with area studies, foreshadowing the university's emphasis on internationalization by carving out specialties in the geographic niches of Asia and Latin America, which dovetailed with Duke faculty interests and existing press strengths. A stable journals program was to provide a steady income to fuel a Great Awakening in the books department.</p> <p>Today, the portfolio is paying solid returns in terms of promotion for Duke University Press authors--who are not necessarily affiliated with Duke in any other way--and in prominence for the press. Its stock has risen steadily, not just because the press champions subject matter in the intellectual vanguard, but because of a concomitant mastery of old-fashioned business virtues: high editorial and production standards, low turnover of key employees, and good customer service--including service to that pesky and peculiarly time-consuming customer, the scholarly author.</p> <p>" We spend a lot of time thinking about the economics of what we do," says Wissoker, "and trying to balance that with our reason for existence, which is to publish scholarship. We give people tenure."</p> <p>Many academics now look to Duke as one of the top presses in the nation in the humanities and social sciences. Mentors quietly urge their protÈgÈs to sniff out opportunities for a first book from Duke. Established scholars such as New York University's chair of East Asian Studies, Harry Harootunian, lump Duke's press in with the likes of those at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, even Oxford and Cambridge. "Duke, while smaller than some university presses and perhaps less established, publishes books as good or better," says Harootunian, who taught for twenty-four years at the University of Chicago before heading for NYU.</p> <p>" My sense is that a Duke book could certainly sustain a tenure at Princeton," reports Anthony Grafton, a history professor there. "Duke was for a long time a very solid, traditional press, and now tends to what cognoscenti call the cutting edge, and critics call the trendy."</p> <p>" Scholarship has to make waves," says Srinivas Aravamudan, an associate professor of English at Duke and a member of its editorial board. "It can't be neutral or it becomes like putty."</p> <img alt="The World Turned" src="/issues/050603/images/lg_KUK_20.jpg" style="float:left; height:341px; width:250px" /> <p>Duke University Press is adept at the art of the turnaround. Although it may now be at the top of its form, it floundered in the1980s amid a welter of well-written but short-lived books on policy studies and international affairs, despite some positive signs. During this era, it installed its first computer system, increased sales, and issued a number of well-received titles, such as C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's The Black Church in the African American Experience and Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The latter has at this point sold more than 40,000 copies, compared with an average of under 1,500 per book, according to Wissoker. Yet the overall quality of books varied widely in those days, and, despite already sporting a journals juggernaut that was the envy of peers, Duke remained an erratic publisher of the second rank. In one especially difficult year, it managed to publish only a dozen new book titles.</p> <p>By 1992 the sense of confusion was palpable. A new director sought more subsidies without offering evidence of a commensurate impact on creation and dissemination of new knowledge. With a lack of clear editorial direction, poor integration with the university community, and a disenchanted faculty, the press began to hear the low sucking sound that betokens a descent into the maelstrom. As losses piled up, the director was dismissed in 1993, and "It was certainly my sense that the press' very existence was in serious jeopardy," says Steve Cohn, who, as associate director at the time, oversaw the journals program.</p> <p>The university turned for help to its colorful Milton scholar Stanley Fish, who had propelled the English department into top-ten status as department chair in the preceding years. It created for him a part-time position of executive director, promoted Cohn to director of publishing operations, and turned them loose. New to the insider's world of publishing, Fish moved swiftly to re-establish the press as an integral part of the Duke University brand name.</p> <img alt="Postmodernism" src="/issues/050603/images/lg_KUK_21.jpg" style="float:right; height:312px; width:250px" /> <p>On his watch, the press crafted a five-year plan that nurtured growth both in size and reputation. It sold off the successful Journal of Personality to raise quick cash for investing in books and shoring up infrastructure. Though not always without controversy, given his multiculturalist agenda, Fish re-engaged fellow faculty as editorial board members, authors, advisers, and consultants--part of the invisible and delicate network of filaments that sustain a successful university press. The morale of the strong but battered staff improved, and soon the fledgling executive director parlayed his high-profile academic credentials into new ventures in literary theory and beyond.</p> <p>" Stanley Fish helped rescue the press and really galvanized the cultural-studies field," says Duke sociology professor and vice provost for international affairs Gil Merkx, who chaired the editorial board of the University of New Mexico Press at the time and now sits on Duke Press' editorial board.</p> <p>When Fish left Duke for the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1998, Cohn inherited the mantle, building on the Fish legacy to capitalize on differential advantages the team had painstakingly created over the years. One such was value-added packaging in the form of elegant composition, design, artwork, typesetting, paper, and binding. "These are beautiful books--books you want to own, not just read--because they're very tactile, very physically accessible," says editorial board member Bruce Lawrence, the university's Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion.</p> <p>Under Cohn, the press maintains a modest proportion (about 20 percent) of "trade" and "academic trade" titles. These books, usually written by academics, hold interest for a wider community of educated readers--curious college graduates, professors stalking new ideas outside the confines of their discipline, public intellectuals, popular writers, policy wonks, autodidacts. Think Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s by Sherry Tucker; Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime, "a provocative look at the literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking"; or Jim Wright's Fixin' to Git: One Fan's Love Affair with NASCAR's Winston Cup.</p> <p>Today, the press has established a strong backlist--titles remaining in print and in stock, usually with steady sales; a biannual catalogue that independent bookstores and scholarly readers have come to trust; and a defensible if not unassailable niche. In the ten years since 1993, it marched steadily from issuing seventy books per year to more than a hundred. With eighty titles somewhere in the pipeline at any given moment, it expects to stabilize soon at a sustainable annual rate of around 120. Last year alone, more than a dozen Duke University Press books received awards, honors, and prizes in the humanities--a hopeful benchmark.</p> <p>" Duke has had a cultural impact beyond its size," according to Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, which often competes with Duke for manuscripts. "My feeling," he says, "is that if it goes to Duke, it's in good hands."</p> <p>Meera Viswanathan, an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University, teaches from a 1994 Duke University Press collection of essays, Postmodernism in Japan. "I think it's an emblematic book for the kind of press Duke is--a press that does more innovative things," says Viswanathan, adding that her department would look favorably at a tenure candidate with a book published by Duke. "In the area of contemporary literary studies, Duke is right up there. The assumption is that if Duke accepted it, it's worthy."</p> <p>High editorial standards, and hence the credibility of a scholarly book, often hinge on the quality of the review process. Before it can be accepted for publication, a manuscript must run a strenuous, even grueling gauntlet. First, its author enjoys (in the old sense) as many as four interactive rounds of revision, re-reading, and anonymous comment. "Readers might be anywhere on the globe who are experts in the field," explains assistant editor Miriam Angress. "There might be one person for the details, one person for theory. Only at the very end, when the readers have signed off on it, do we ever bring things to the editorial board."</p> <p>Championed by an in-house editor, the manuscript must next receive the imprimatur of a group of seasoned Duke faculty who vet the author's credentials and correspondence, read the wannabe's first and last chapter (or more), peruse the reviews, and serve as the final gatekeepers and quality controllers of intellectual substance and methodology. Without the editorial board's thumbs-up, the manuscript miscarries.</p> <img alt="Swing Shift" src="/issues/050603/images/lg_KUK_22.jpg" style="float:left; height:319px; width:250px" /> <p>As faculty service goes, it doesn't sound like a plum job. Board members receive a ream or more of paper before each meeting, and they are expected to read it. But it's a labor of love that benefits them, too, according to Merkx, who savors the chance both to learn what's new in his field and to learn about recent scholarship outside it, particularly in the cultural studies arena.</p> <p>Anne Allison, who chairs the department of cultural anthropology, has served on the editorial board for the last three years. "We don't accept every book that is presented to us by the editors," she points out, "if we feel it does not live up to the standards of scholarship, if it's not well enough researched, if it's not exciting, if it's not well-written, or if it's pandering to one specific audience."</p> <p>The board, explains Lawrence, functions in a way that's "not adversarial but introspective, and even counter-intuitive. Our meetings are really intense and of high intellectual caliber. We had one book that took four and half years from when it was first submitted to the board to when it was finally published. These guys involve faculty in a complementary role at a higher level than is the case for most university presses." As the editor of a series on Islamic civilization and Muslim networks for another established university press and a much sought-after scholar who has published books with at least six different houses, he knows.</p> <p>Invited to pick a favorite book that had cleared all hurdles and made its mark in the world, Cohn points with special pride, he says, to 1995's bestseller The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Duke faculty member Orin Starn and others, it brought to English-speaking readers a set of mainly Peruvian views of Peru--in contrast to the usual ethnocentric perspective as seen from the United States or Europe. Now the prototype for a whole series covering various Latin countries, The Peru Reader underscores the linkage of the press' reputation to that of the university itself, which boasts a strong Latin American studies faculty, and it illustrates the synergies between books and journals: The Hispanic American Historical Review is another long-running serial.</p> <p>Cohn sees the journal-trade book-monograph mix as contributing to making his organization "a leader among academic publishers--not just an up-and-comer with lots of potential, but a press that can be counted on to sustain its level of excellence year after year." They've stepped out and stepped up; the press' five-year plan calls for it to solidify its position among the top ten--at least.</p> <p>But can they hold their own in an industry showing signs of senescence? Iowa State sold its press outright in 2000. Last fall, there were public rumors that Northwestern's might fold. At about the same time, Stanford University Press, generally regarded as one of the most prestigious, let a top editor go and slashed the number of books it planned to publish in the humanities. In February, Columbia University Press sacked its director, citing failure to meet financial goals despite a 12 percent increase in sales.</p> <div> <p>University presses have long regarded publishing as the third pillar supporting the modern research university, along with research and teaching. Yet they are reporting ever-larger losses--from an average of 10.8 percent to 19.7 percent over a three-year period, according to Malcolm Litchfield, director of the Ohio State University Press. Rising marketing and production costs; widespread budget cuts, particularly at cash-strapped public universities; declining demand for monographs--scholarly academic books essentially written for a small audience of other scholars--are some of the bogeys frequently cited.</p> <p>Research libraries, long a traditional ally and probably the biggest consumer of hardcover monographs, have been diverting large chunks of their acquisitions budgets to pay for ever more expensive subscriptions to scientific, technical, and medical journals--STMs, in trade argot--which are largely the province of commercial publishers. At Duke, according to University Librarian David Ferriero, the number of university press books purchased relative to the library's total book acquisitions dropped during the last decade from about 12 percent per year to less than 7 percent per year. Given relatively fixed budgets, this trend has been disastrous for scholarly publishing.</p> <p>Virtually all university presses have long relied on some degree of subsidy from their parent institution, but those, too, are eroding during the economic downturn. Says Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, "All our members are nonprofit. Support comes in a variety of forms, from cash for operating expenses to in-kind support such as free rent or lower-than-market rent, to access to university resources such as legal counsel. It's part of the package that makes scholarly books financially possible."</p> <p>Duke University subsidizes Duke University Press and has no plans to stop, says Provost Peter Lange. Nevertheless, the press needs to find new revenue sources without sacrificing quality scholarship, he says, adding, "Our press, like all university presses, is under extreme pressure, both financially and intellectually."</p> <p>" Duke is very well-positioned--provided it gets the kind of support it has enjoyed until now from the university and trustees," cautions board member Aravamudan.</p> <img alt="Fixin to Git" src="/issues/050603/images/lg_KUK_23.jpg" style="float:right; height:321px; width:250px" /> <p>The press, for its part, calls Lange's approach one of "tough love." He can be a sharp critic, they say, but persuade him that you have a good idea, and he will stand behind it--presumably because press people have given him cause to trust their judgment.</p> <p>Can Duke Press keep up? Besides its reputation for high-quality people, products, and processes, several factors suggest that it may be more robust than most. First, the press publishes a relatively large number of journals for its size--thirty-five at last count. Financial cross-subsidies from the journals program help underwrite the hefty cost of acquiring, developing, editing, designing, producing, marketing, selling, and distributing books. And there are intellectual synergies between the units.</p> <p>Though mostly intended for a purely scholarly audience, these serials include flagship publications in their disciplines such as American Literature, edited by Duke English professor Houston Baker; the Duke Mathematical Journal, one of the first to be distributed in machine-readable form; and South Atlantic Quarterly, "a journal of thought and action" established by the storied John Spencer Bassett at the dawn of the twentieth century.</p> <p>The journals program expects to expand even further in coming years, launching or acquiring STM publications that it believes can become profitable while nevertheless selling for more modest subscription rates than the commercial serials that break libraries' backs. Duke recently took on Neuro-Oncology, its first medical journal.</p> <p>In addition, the press is carefully cultivating broader audiences for its books. New American Studies and Latin American Studies volumes, for example, are finding a crossover market among intellectually minded tourists as well as undergraduates, says Aravamudan. Future trade titles, though similar in number, may be increasingly key sources of income to underwrite important but rarefied monographs.</p> <p>Another strength is Duke's ability to cultivate scholars--and especially its willingness to invest in junior scholars--by offering them excellent service and customized publishing packages. Arun Agrawal Ph.D. '92, an associate professor of political science at McGill University, could have published his first book with Cambridge University Press, arguably the most prestigious in his field. Instead, he chose his alma mater to issue Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community Among a Migrant Pastoral People, about a group of shepherds in western India whose impact is usually ignored by political scientists. It wasn't blind loyalty that brought him back, but enlightened self-interest: Duke offered him a paperback edition when Cambridge wouldn't, and he wanted his brainchild to be within reach of students' pocketbooks. Agrawal also wanted an edition published in India. Cambridge refused; Duke arranged it. They also gave him a seasoned editor he loves--Valerie Millholland--and sent out copies to major journals in anthropology, political science, and Asian Studies, where he received highly favorable reviews.</p> <p>" It was a very quick process, without compromising scholarly standards," says Agrawal, who now has a contract on a second book with Duke. "I found the whole experience to be a very inviting one."</p> <p>Elizabeth Freeman, an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Davis, reports a similarly positive experience publishing her first book, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. "Duke's considered a sexy press," she says. "A serious scholarly press with a certain amount of style--rigorous but not stodgy, stylish but not affected."</p> <p>She had been sought out by Wissoker, who had been impressed with a paper she presented at the Modern Language Association conference when still a shy graduate student at the University of Chicago. "Ken was remarkably patient and generous with me for two years, and when I finally did send the manuscript, he facilitated a smooth, helpful reader-report process that resulted in an advance contract," she says. "Shortly thereafter, I shifted jobs, and Ken worked with me to ensure that the revisions, production work, and date of publication synchronized well with a new tenure clock."</p> <p>Nor does Duke appeal only to junior faculty. Karla Holloway, William R. Kenan Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Duke, had published before with Rutgers University Press, making a lifelong friend of her editor. At first, she toyed with the idea of turning to a commercial press for what became Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories, a cultural and historic look at bereavement, death, dying, and burial in twentieth-century African America. But in the end she chose Duke.</p> <p>" I knew they did wonderful books and I wanted to be in that list," says Holloway, who is also dean of humanities and social sciences for Trinity College. Part of the attraction was working with Wissoker. Because she was writing, in part, about the death of her own son, "The book had become the personal as well as the professional story, and I wanted someone near to home who would be attentive, as I knew Ken would."</p> <p>Still, beyond the need of scholars to talk to other scholars in a way that will get them tenure or a named chair, who needs a university press, really? Within the disciplines they choose to champion, university presses advance understanding and create new knowledge, Holloway says. "I think it's our responsibility as an informed community to share information. We cannot rely on bestsellers to contain the kind of information that helps us understand why we are who we are as a people. University presses allow us to reflect on our citizenry and changes in culture. University presses advance our own intelligence."</p> <p>Even the better popular writing often ultimately depends on the existence of scholarly monographs, adds Lange. "It may be that much of the general public does not want to read a monograph on social interaction of people in a very remote corner of a region of Africa--but they might be interested in a book about a regional conflict in Africa and the ability of terrorism to flourish there. The author who writes that second book could not have made an informed contribution to policy if these monographs hadn't been published first. University presses are a crucial rung in the ladder of knowledge."</p> <p>Just how crucial was illustrated by the press' decision to publish Roland Jacquard's In the Name of Osama bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the bin Laden Brotherhood, which Duke brought out in record time just months after September 11, 2001. H. Lee Willoughby-Harris, associate marketing manager for books at the press, recalls, "We wanted to create a book for understanding, something that would intervene in public and private discussions about what was going on in this country and in the world."</p> <p>It was not a typical project for any university press, but it became a different kind of book precisely because of Duke's own interventions, editorial and otherwise. Within weeks, 13,000 copies were in circulation, and the hardcover edition sold out. It strained the resources of the press--especially of the people--almost to the breaking point.</p> <p>" When a public has to come to terms with an event this large, and it involves geopolitical and religious elements that perhaps they haven't been called upon to understand before, there needs to be some background reading to help them," says Willoughby-Harris. "That's what we have provided. That speaks to the larger project of university presses."</p> <p>Just one holding in the portfolio, advancing intelligence one reader at a time.</p> <p><em>Baerman M.B.A. '90 is a special assistant to the president. Susan Kauffman, special assistant to the senior vice president for public affairs, also contributed to this story.</em></p> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Sunday, June 1, 2003</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_KUK_25.jpg" width="620" height="422" alt="&quot;We spend a lot of time thinking about the economics of what we do, and trying to balance that with our reason for existence, which is to publish scholarship. We give people tenure.&quot; -KEN WISSOKER, Editor-in-Chief. Photo: Chris Hildreth" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Good Odds on Bookmaking: While most university presses are scaling back, if not shutting down, Duke&#039;s is experiencing a steady return, based on good planning, some strong titles, specialty journals, and its reputation among academics.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sun, 01 Jun 2003 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18499872 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/publishing-not-perishing#comments History 129B https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/history-129b <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><p class="articletitle">You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements," wrote British author Norman Douglas. But as associate professor of history Sydney Nathans will tell you, ideals are far from static, and the tenor and substance of ads have changed radically over the past 150 years. Consistently, research on advertisements provides a magnifying glass for the juniors and seniors who enroll in his social and cultural history course.</p><p>On both sides of the Atlantic, Nathans explains, the Victorian period was characterized by enormous strain as people moved (geographically or psychologically) away from villages and small communities to bigger and bigger places. History 129B is really about the unexpected social turbulence brought on by this shift from a village-centered to a market-centered economy and lifestyle, and what society did about it. "It becomes a story about the making of the middle class," Nathans says.</p><p>The classic Victorian moral formula for a world in disarray was self-discipline--relying on one's inner moral compass. But the formula excluded many groups: women, African Americans, Southerners, working people. Students delve into Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and John Hope Franklin's edition of W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk. They peruse Upton Sinclair's The Jungle--"written to be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the twentieth century, to focus on industrial slavery," says Nathans--and Edward Ayers' Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877-1906.</p><p>Confronted by the rising anger and uneasiness its very mores had engendered, what was late nineteenth-century America to do? The class goes on to examine three potential solutions society came up with: first, Populism and Socialism, as seen through the lens of Nick Salvatore's biography of labor organizer and jailed presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs; second, the paternalistic model of corporate behavior as evidenced in the mill town, where, in Nathans' words, "We'll charge you next to no rent and pay you next to nothing, employ your whole family, and patrol you morally"; and third, the mercantile solution--the one that lasted. It was a breathtaking ideological shift: make consumers of everybody; pay them enough to buy the products they helped manufacture, and you could ease social, political, and economic unrest of the disenfranchised and historically dispossessed. Make them want, and let them have what they want--at a price.</p><p>Doing that meant overcoming Victorian commitment to the ideals of parsimony, saving, and self-denial. So the course turns to look at the rise of the department store and the radical rethinking of marketing, with help from William Leach's Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.</p><p>Students undertake a fifteen-page paper. It is there that the library's John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History comes into play, often in tandem with nineteenth- and twentieth-century magazines. The collection, now ten years old and growing in size, includes not only such raw materials as advertisements and radio scripts but also a treasure trove of internal communications, minutes, and correspondence of the likes of J. Walter Thompson, the dominant American ad agency of the period.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2002-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, June 1, 2002</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2002</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 01 Jun 2002 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501852 at https://alumni.duke.edu Public Policy 126S https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/public-policy-126s <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><p>A former journalist, political scientist Ken Rogerson began publishing scholarly articles on Internet regulation while still a graduate student. Today his seminars attract junior and senior engineering students, computer scientists, sociology majors, cultural anthropologists, and historians, as well as public policy majors. "They're very interested in it," he says, "but it's been challenging for me. When I talk about the technical side, the computer science students are falling asleep; when I get into politics and public policy, the engineers are lost. It's been fun for me to adapt to an interdisciplinary mode."</p><p>Part of the solution was to engage the students with one another in small groups. As a class, they start by reading Andrew Shapiro's <em>The Control Revolution</em> and Lawrence Lessig's <em>The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World</em>, books that set up a basic dialectic that informs the whole semester. "The world contains Internet pessimists and Internet optimists," explains Rogerson, "those who believe that the Internet and accompanying technologies can change the world for the better, and those who believe that the Internet is just going to give those in control more control. When we're talking about privacy, we talk about privacy-optimism and privacy-pessimism, and that makes for a nice basis for the course."</p><p>They have discussions on democratic pluralism, political aspects of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (the nonprofit group that parcels out domain names), the basics of policy-making theory. They invite such guest speakers as the technology reporter for MSNBC.com in Seattle, who specializes in covering "hacktivists"--computer hackers with a moral mission; a computer security expert for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, who discusses the changing face of security on government websites; and Brian Cantwell-Smith, Duke's Kimberly J. Jenkins University Professor of New Technologies and Society, who talks about the normative dimensions of computing.</p><p>Students spend the first half of the term studying domestic issues in the United States--the digital divide, the Internet in campaigns, interest groups, and elections. Online voting isn't yet a burning issue anywhere in the world but here, even though the populations of countries such as Estonia are far more "wired." Then comes Internet regulation, taxation, and free-speech issues--also peculiar to the U.S., Rogerson says, because unlike even our closest European cousins, we treat free speech as an inherent right rather than one that must be created through legislation.</p><p>The second half of the class concentrates on international issues, and the room always seems to contain an international student or two to add thoughtful perspective and a dose of non-virtual reality. Here they look into global information infrastructure, Internet governance and history, and, of course, e-commerce. In their final week, they cover computer-based terrorism and cyberwarfare.</p><p>Students must write two "policy memos," a research paper on geographical Internet diffusion, a report and presentation on sites they have monitored for hot policy topics such as online gambling and pornography, and a final essay. Much of their effort goes into small-group efforts at creating a merged class website containing links, analysis, and bibliographies about an Internet-related subject. At <a href="http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/dewitt/course/internet/images/internet.htm"><strong>www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/dewitt/course/internet/images/internet.htm</strong></a>, for instance, last spring's class explored the broad areas of copyright, privacy, piracy, medicine on the Net, intellectual property flow, voting, and financial fraud.</p><p>But if any syllabus focused on the Internet sounds like it must be a moving target or self-destructing artifact, consider that for next semester Rogerson may also assign a book published in 1944, a generation before the invention of the personal computer: economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi's masterwork, <em>The Great Transformation</em>, which chastised the capitalist world for not looking at the negative consequences of an economic model that enslaved government to the dictates of ruthless mercantilism and ignored the very poverty the system generated. "I think I might invite my students to try to apply his concepts to the information revolution," Rogerson says.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2002-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Sunday, March 31, 2002</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2002</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sun, 31 Mar 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501019 at https://alumni.duke.edu Four On The Floor https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/four-floor <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p>Four hundred rapt listeners in Reynolds Auditorium hold their breath. The luminous personalities of the players flicker gradually through the great nexus of sound: the violist hearty and good-natured, the cellist insistent, one violinist passionately partisan, the other calmly engaged.</p> <p>By turns they adopt one another's attitudes, mimic a turn of phrase, move their bows in tandem, or are off at a tantivy like squirrels round a tree. They could be dancers circling a cobra, jailers surrounding a pretender to the throne, or a forest fire just this side of being under control. But they are the Ciompi String Quartet, and tonight is the first concert of their thirty-seventh season at Duke.</p> <p>You read the music in their bodies. During Beethoven's Opus 18, #4, in C minor, they share the same air, the four inhaling in tandem at the start of a phrase as if not one of them could breathe independently of the others. There are nods, eye contact, furrowed brows.</p> <p>First violinist Eric Pritchard, his legs splayed out closest to the audience, articulates with his spine and emotes with his features. In succession, you see bliss, amusement, agony pass over his face as he leans forward, relaxes, falls back. He lifts his eyebrows suggestively and out from his instrument wafts an amorous phrase.</p> <p>Second violinist Hsiao-Mei Ku, the sole woman on stage, remains less demonstrative, her equanimity an anchor for the Sturm und Drang around her. Her elegant silver-gray gown contrasts with the severe tuxedos of the men. Her expression remains cool, her flourishes restrained. She intervenes, underscores, matches the others at every step, and when at last the violins burst into a duet, her sound intertwines indistinguishably with Pritchard's and lingers in the still air. She has the pellucid smile of da Vinci's La Gioconde.</p> <p>Jonathan Bagg, the tallest of the four, clasps the viola in his large hands, then unself-consciously caresses it with his cheek. As the music builds, he raises his feet slightly off the floor, holding back. Then suddenly comes a lyrical motive in the viola and he half rises to meet it, coming bodily off the chair for an instant as his instrument evokes an ancient mystery. He settles again.</p> <p>Cellist Fred Raimi's visage becomes a study in fierce concentration during a marcato passage, like a carving of an ancient samurai guarding the emperor. He gives his great white mane a shake to emphasize an accent, then again, again, relentless. With his pursed lips, he seems to be crooning to his instrument.</p> <p>"It's like watching four people who are married to each other having a really good discussion," says Marilyn Hartman, the Ciompi's manager and longtime fan.</p> <p>The Ciompi Quartet was founded on personality. Its origins lie with the virtuoso violinist Giorgio Ciompi, a performer with Arturo Toscanini and other greats, who came to Duke in the early 1960s specifically to start a quartet. These days his eponymous successors play some eighty concerts each year, presenting as many as forty different pieces, each of which must be polished to the appropriate translucence. They rehearse for several hours every weekday during the academic year, holding local benefit concerts for battered women, the U.N.'s anti-land mine project, Meals on Wheels, a synagogue, the Durham School of the Arts.</p> <p>In its thirty-seven seasons, the quartet has been through six violinists, four violists, and two cellists-always one at a time, always with a smooth transition from player to player, and always keeping the same name. Some say its current configuration, in place for the past six years, may be the best ever. When the latest member, Eric Pritchard, came, "We did not have to start at square one," says his colleague Ku. "We were already at square eight."</p> <p>Personality continues to drive them, but in a different way, as Pritchard explains. "There's no boss or leader. One person that feels passionately can often sway three people who are less committed to a point of view." "It's important for the individuals to be allowed to assert themselves," says Bagg. "One mistake some quartets make is that they assume there has to be this uniformity, or they don't feel really polished. If someone's sticking out a bit, they hammer him down so it sounds like a completely organic whole. But I think that's boring. They keep one another from speaking in their own voice."</p> <p>Raimi shrugs. "The personality of the quartet is the sum and multiplication of the personalities of the four people in it."</p> <p>Depending on whom you ask, the university is variously their favorite or their most stressful concert venue, or both. Besides the four formal concerts in the series, they might take on another twenty Duke performances at, say, faculty recitals and new-music concerts, in dorms, and at dinners for visiting dignitaries, such as last year's appearance before Canadian Prime Minister Jean ChrÈtien. "They have always been my first choice to embellish a formal evening," says President Nannerl O. Keohane.</p> <p>"People recognize us as a good ambassador for the university," says Bagg. Besides dozens of concerts around North Carolina-Oriental, Wilmington, and an annual festival in Highlands, for instance-they play regularly in New York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago, and sometimes as far away as England, Bolivia, and the People's Republic of China. They will regale the willing listener with stories of life on the road-groupies who bike from Boston to New Hampshire to catch a performance; driving all night when a NASCAR rally had filled every hotel; Bagg's famous homemade spaghetti sauce. "And when the quartet shares an apartment at a festival," Hsiao-Mei Ku confides conspiratorially, "Eric always looks forward to it because he can barely boil water."</p> <p>But what business does a full-time string quartet have at an institution dedicated to research, education, and patient care? Most universities other than those with a high-powered music conservatory, after all, have at best a quartet in residence for a week or ten days at a time.</p> <p>"Most faculty string quartets remain invisible to the rest of the department as they pursue their own concerts and other performing activities," says Scott Lindroth, associate professor in the music department. "The Ciompi Quartet, on the other hand, has always sought opportunities to participate in all aspects of the music curriculum. So, in addition to studio teaching, the performance faculty also contribute to history, theory, and composition courses. Why play a recording of a Mozart quartet when we can have the Ciompi perform the piece for the students in class? And what better way to teach students about composing for the string quartet than to have the Ciompi play their pieces?"</p> <p>Stephen Jaffe, the Mary and James H. Semans Professor of Composition, concurs. "When our faculty has a composer struggling with string writing, we can send her right across the hall to ask how a passage fits for the viola or the cello," he says. "These kinds of experiences are irreplaceable."</p> <p>Antony John, of Bournemouth, England, now in his final year of the Ph.D. program in composition, says that if a graduate student writes a piece for string quartet, it's virtually guaranteed that it will be performed and recorded. "We use those recordings to apply for competitions and job applications for university posts," he says. "To have performances that polished by a group that good reflects very well on us. Whenever I go to conferences or speak to composers elsewhere, the first thing they notice is that the best performance I have [of my recorded work] is a string quartet."</p> <p>On this evening in Reynolds Auditorium, the Ciompi goes on to introduce a world premiere: a quartet they have commissioned from Malcolm Peyton, co-chair of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music. It begins with a lyrical soliloquy in the second violin, so heartbreakingly plangent that it gives rise to the speculation the composer must have been in love with a second violinist. The playing continues flawlessly, the piece reminiscent of the work of American composer Roger Sessions.</p> <p>"Remaking the canon doesn't mean abandoning wonderfully rich traditions of interpretation," explains Jaffe. "It means adding to them. You don't stop studying Biblical literature or Chaucer because popular attention is more focused on sitcoms. In a department of music, it is appropriate to devote attention to the canon-however it shifts-but also to investigate new kinds of music."</p> <p>The quartet has commissioned pieces from several Duke graduate students as well as established composers. Last year, with subsidies from the Duke Institute of the Arts and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, they helped make a CD devoted to works of Mark Kuss Ph.D. '95, who has written two quartets with the Ciompi in mind. The CD includes his American Triptych for string quartet and tape. Raimi recalls its most striking movement, "Let's Get a Taco." "The tape was a violent monologue by Harvey Keitel from the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs. Mark used the monologue-the rhythms, accents, and pitch of the voice-as a melodic basis for the quartet. We accompany it, we comment on it. It was a fascinating and, I thought, a brilliant thing. Mark is commenting very strongly about the viability of Western classical music today in relation to pop culture. This was beautiful music with a social script."</p> <p>At each of this and last season's four Duke concerts, they introduced or will introduce a new work, often a premiere they've commissioned. "I always tell the composers there have to be good cello solos," says cellist Raimi, mischievously.</p> <p>Having studied at the famed Juilliard School of Music in New York and with Pablo Casals and other teachers, Raimi has spent the last twenty-seven years at Duke. Like all the members of the Ciompi String Quartet, he holds the position of associate professor of the practice in the department of music-responsible for studio teaching as a half-time gig. "Classical music is not dead at all," he says, "but there are many other things that have come to life at the same time. We're a reputable, established string quartet, and if we don't promote new music, who will?"</p> <p>Music department professor and chair R. Larry Todd points out that the Ciompi's enthusiasm for new music fits into a well-established tradition. "Take Haydn, who is often thought to embody the classical. He was very mindful of the popular music of his day, often drawing on folk melodies and rhythms. We think of a minuet as a court dance for aristocrats: Haydn would begin his minuets in a courtly style, but not infrequently in the trio [the second section of a minuet] he would use popular music with rustic rhythms. There's been an unfortunate delineation between highbrow and lowbrow. The reality is that the lines were not always distinct."</p> <p>"The Ciompi don't put bags over their heads and play things that sound like whales giving birth," says Hartman. "Their audience trusts them, and I think it is incumbent on performers who can afford to do it-and the Ciompi can afford to do it-to bring new music to the scene and teach the rest of us how to listen to it."</p> <p>"Symphonic music draws audiences more easily because of its big scope," says second violinist Hsaio-Mei Ku, who relinquished her position as associate concertmaster with the North Carolina Symphony in 1990 to join Duke's faculty. "But chamber music is like poetry-a poem that has few words. We live in the twenty-first century and we want to speak the poetry of today."</p> <p>Why, though, would professional musicians of the highest caliber want to live and work so far outside the locus for the arts that a major metropolitan area would provide? "I came to Duke because I wanted to play in a quartet," says Bagg, who is also director of undergraduate studies for the music department. "Quartets have a much more difficult time surviving if they don't have a real appointment that grounds and supports them. Every quartet reaches a point in its career where it has to get some kind of attachment to an institution; even the most famous have a residency. It's just too difficult to make your careers only from traveling and performing concerts.</p> <p>"A chamber-music audience has to be cultivated and educated. It takes time-maybe ten years-and then you have a good audience who have learned enough to know what to listen for. When I got here in '86, the audience was already very cultivated. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to come."</p> <p>Pritchard puts it more simply: "My favorite thing about being at Duke is that Duke wants to have me here."</p> <p>They also love teaching, as seen in Raimi's reflections on the process. "To learn to play a Bach suite is as deep an educational experience as you're going to get because it's not only in the mind, it's in the body. You physically learn to do something complex and large-scale-a twenty- or thirty-minute piece. Learning a major piece of music is as valuable as or more valuable than any individual thing you might do in your college career. To understand the structure of a movement and how it's built, what the high points are, how to interpret individual musical phrases and put them together into a whole, makes the mind work in a very serious way."</p> <p>Stephen Jaffe sum its up: "For undergraduates, a university experience should open up all kinds of aesthetic worlds-not just scholarship about aesthetics."</p> <p>The quartet could not have lasted all these years without the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation's support, which is now gradually being reduced as the university tries to pick up more of their budget. In recent years, they have also relied on The Friends of the Ciompi Quartet, donors who direct some or all of their annual Duke contributions to a fund bolstering the group's outreach efforts.</p> <p>The support of the sixty or so Friends enables not only the commissioning of new repertoire, paying guest artists, and the making of CDs, but also their playing on tour, says Kathy Silbiger, program director for Duke's Institute of the Arts. "Every musical organization loses money when they tour. The Ciompi's presence is a national and community outreach from the university. Real music has to be a living art form: If it's not played and experienced, it will die."</p> <p>"One of the things that the Duke connection makes possible for them," she says, "is the freedom to be as adventurous as they are. They're not solely subject to market forces. They use that freedom in a very responsible, very idealistic way, achieving a balance between playing works that they love and that they know their traditional audience will love, and just risking it and putting some stuff out there that's untested."</p> <p>Yet much of the Ciompi's new music is performed first-or only-at Duke precisely because the Duke audience is sophisticated enough to appreciate it, according to Hartman.</p> <p>Professor Lindroth agrees. "Judging by how many of my colleagues from other departments I see at concerts," he says, "I believe they would regard Duke as impoverished by the absence of the kind of musicianship and artistry offered by the Ciompi Quartet."</p> <p>Predictably, the performers recognize many people in attendance tonight: string students from throughout the Triangle; administrators, retirees, and library staffers, musiciens manquÈs and wannabes; faculty and grad students from philosophy, history, classics, the sciences.</p> <p>After an intermission, they launch into Schubert's memorable opus 163, the string quintet in C major, which requires a second cello in the person of guest artist Norman Fischer, flown in from Houston for the occasion. Before they begin, Raimi rises for an impromptu announcement: "We'd like to invite you to a reception immediately following the concert," he says, "so you can meet the musicians-such as they are." The audience titters and Raimi looks pleased.</p> <p>This kind of offbeat humor and informal relationship with listeners, who know that his self-deprecation masks an intense commitment, is a hallmark of the Ciompi style.</p> <p>The players agree that audiences differ dramatically, and that Duke audiences are consistently good and critical listeners. Says Bagg, "You develop a following, friends amongst your audience who like to come to your concerts because they know you and have seen you play many times, and they want to see what you come up with this time. If you have a bad night, they forgive you.</p> <p>"I don't think it's true, though, that it's easier to play at home than away. It's harder because these are people you see in other contexts every day. You feel a certain responsibility to them, that you have to play well because they know your entire history."</p> <p>Though the group collectively aspires to more national and international exposure, Raimi admits that for him, "Where we play concerts is less important than how we play concerts. I hope the quartet continues to improve as a musical entity, to get more insight into the great composers and play their music better and more beautifully. If we can be there in five years, I'll be happy."</p> <p>The playing's the thing. Back in his studio on a hot summer afternoon, Eric Pritchard says wistfully, "As hard as you might try in rehearsal, you never get quite that sense of magical communication that exists when an audience is there. You can't ever forget who your audience is and who you're trying to reach."</p> <p>He turns and looks me in the eye, almost sternly. "Music is a few steps further down the path of abstraction than poetry is. To apply words to it is always a compromise."</p> <p>He pauses thoughtfully. "My greatest fear," he says, looking away, "is that I'll bore people."</p> <p>No chance.</p> <hr /> <p><em>Baerman M.B.A. '90, an oboist, is special assistant to Duke's president.</em></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Friday, November 30, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/four1.jpg" width="620" height="415" alt="The quartet in rehearsal: from left, Eric Pritchard, Hsiao-Mei Ku, Jonathan Bagg, and Fred Raimi. Les Todd." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">What business does a full-time string quartet have at an institution dedicated to research, education, and patient care? &quot;For undergraduates, a university experience should open up all kinds of aesthetic worlds.&quot;</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Fri, 30 Nov 2001 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501320 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/four-floor#comments