Note to readers: This is the story of how I came to write an essay called “Why Gödel and Escher But Not Bach” for a book about the future of orchestras. I should add that I know almost nothing about orchestras and feel deeply uncomfortable in public classical music spaces. I was definitely NOT the right person to be asked to write this essay. I did end up writing the essay, but it was definitely one of the most challenging tasks I have undertaken. This blog post is just my complaining about how hard it was to write this essay, even though, I am extremely proud and pleased with where I ended up. I totally understand if you would rather skip my writerly angst and just read the actual essay. You can find it here in the full book (or read just my essay). But if you’re curious about the messy process of collaborative imagination and how being the “wrong person” can sometimes be exactly right, read on.
I’ve always been impressed by the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at ASU. I love, in particular, their ability to bring together writers and scientists; artists and engineers to collectively imagine how the world might be. And the products of their explorations are always fun and thought-provoking. So, a few years back, when I got an invitation to participate in a workshop on the future of orchestras, my first instinct was to say yes.
My second instinct was to ask, “why me?”
Orchestra and me. We’ve never really gotten along. Our relationship has been more like ships passing in the night, if one ship was a little yacht and the other a massive cruise ship. The first could not help be aware of the second, while the second didn’t know of the other’s existence.
To be honest, I tried to wriggle out of it. I’m not a musician, I said. I don’t know much about orchestras. I’ve never felt comfortable in symphony halls. You probably, actually definitely, want someone else, for this topic. But Alex Laing, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn, the organizers, insisted I was exactly who they wanted. We need different perspectives, they said. We need people like you.
And all I had to do, they added, was participate in a fun, interactive, 2-day workshop and then write a short reflective piece, due someday far in the future, for publication in a book.
That seemed reasonable, so I said yes.
The workshop was fun. It was structured around four teams, each exploring orchestras through a different lens: Orchestra as Public Good; Infrastructure; Network; and Game (my team). Overall, the participants were an eclectic group, consisting of musicians, music educators, scholars. Each team, however, always included one author of speculative fiction. For instance, the Orchestra as Game team that I was a part of, included Amy K. Nichols, a science fiction author whose novels and short stories often explore the intersection of art and science; my ASU colleague, Evan Tobias, a music educator and professor who leads the Consortium for Innovation and Transformation in Music Education; and William Cheng, a writer, pianist, gamer, and professor of music at Dartmouth, whose work often bridges art, justice, and play. I was clearly the odd one out, the interloper, as it were. I have to say my team never made me feel that way, and I really enjoyed the conversations and learned a lot through these chats.
Over two days, we brainstormed, built speculative narratives, got thrown curveballs in the form of cards introducing everything from AI to climate change. There was even a field trip to explore the latest in immersive audio technology.
But then the workshop was done—and we all headed home.
One obligation remained. I still needed to write that piece of reflection for the book that would emerge from our workshop. And now it was time to deliver on my part of the deal.
Let me just say, these CSI people are smart, and evil.
To say that it was a struggle to write this essay is an understatement. At some level I knew what I was supposed to do. What I didn’t know was what to say. I had all these fragments rattling around in my head, based on our conversations and my thinking. Some had to do with my lack of connection with orchestral music; my complicated relationship with a Douglas Hofstadter book I’d loved as a teenager; and lots of other ideas that made little sense, individually or together. Little of it seemed to have anything to do with the task at hand.
In my somewhat random research and thinking, I came across Mircea Eliade and his book The Sacred and the Profane. I had actually been introduced to this book by my friend Hartosh, back in high school. The idea of the sacred and the profane seemed interesting and worth exploring. At the same time, during my research on the book, I started learning about Eliade’s complicated life and relationship to India. In fact, his first published book was a semi-autobiographical novel about a young man’s visit to India and his relationship with a young woman there. This connection to my country of birth seemed worth exploring since there were parallels I felt I could explore: the meeting of East and West, and the misunderstandings and cultural blind spots we all get trapped in. That story deserved to be in this essay, but I would be darned if I knew how that could fit in.
For months, I struggled. Themes and ideas, would emerge, faint as mist, and vanish just as suddenly, when the light of judgment appeared. The piece kept going all over the place. I’d start with one thread, follow it for pages, then realize I was completely lost. The writing felt scattered, incoherent. I began to suspect what I’d known all along: I really was the wrong person for this job.
Why had I said yes to this? I wondered. People in my office got used to me walking up and down muttering to myself. I struggled and chafed and complained, thought of backing out of the project, only to change my mind. Talked to Joey, one of the editors, about backing out and was convinced by him not to.
In short, I was a mess.
Then, weeks (maybe months) into this, a memory surfaced. Of a conference I had attended some months ago, and a casual remark by someone there that had bothered me. I knew then that I had the start of the essay, as well as a segue to Eliade’s ideas. And Hofstadter, always lurking, found his way in as well.
And after months and multiple incomplete drafts, I had a version, still very rough, that I shared with the CSI team.
That’s when Joey stepped back in. Not exhausted by already playing two roles in the project (organizer and personal counsellor) he came in this time, as my editor.
Joey has a rare editorial superpower. Most editors read what you’ve written and respond to that. Joey reads what you’re trying to write. He can see past the mess on the page to the argument you’re unconsciously reaching toward. When he sent back comments on my draft, it wasn’t “here’s what your essay says.” It was “is this what you’re trying to say.”
And what I was trying to say, it turned out, was exactly about being the wrong person.
Joey’s input pushed me forward. It allowed me to actually explore what it meant to be an outsider, and dig deeper into it. He offered suggestions on how to weave the pieces together and a lot more.
He could see how all those disparate elements I had been playing with: Eliade’s ideas of the sacred and the profane, my discomfort in symphony halls, the tragic story about a Romanian scholar and an Indian woman; came together.
And though writing this essay was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, I am extremely proud of where it has ended up. I love where it landed. Not because it solved anything, but because it captured something true about cultural exclusion that a more conventional piece couldn’t have touched. My outsider status wasn’t a bug in the system: it was a feature.
The book is out now: Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra, and so is my essay. It’s free to download from the CSI website. My piece sits alongside speculative fiction by Ernest Hogan and Karen Lord, insights from musicians and engineers and public health scholars.
And the crazy part is that the pieces in the section on Orchestra as Game work really well together, even though we did not interact in any substantive way once the workshop was over. Amy’s speculative vision of Phoenix where a violinist’s last concert transforms into a shared act of connection and hope; Evan pushing us to think about what orchestras might look like if audiences were invited to co-create, collaborate, and even make decisions alongside musicians; and finally, William’s exploration of what it means to improvise, challenging assumptions about virtuosity, perfection, and accessibility. And my essay, sits there, an exploration of how culture, history, and power shape what counts as beauty. Each piece is different in style and substance, but they cohere together in a meaningful way.
Maybe the CSI people do know something … something about the magic that can happen when you bring together people who don’t usually talk to each other.
I post almost everything I write to this blog but I rarely, if ever, ask people to click the link and read it.
This piece, I believe, is different and I hope all of you will take a few minutes to read it.
Thank you to my team and the organizers and editors (named above) for the opportunity, the conversations and the support. This could not have happened without that.