reaching out; perfection

[Julian.West@mac.dartmouth.edu]

I wish to congratulate IED on his excellent analysis
of the song _Reaching Out_. He has obviously put a
significant amount of thought into understanding the
song, and, through it, Kate's intentions. And all of
this insight into just one song! 

One quibble: since he concentrated primarily on the
structure of the song and the mood it creates, he had
few words for the orchestration, which is also, to
coin a phrase, perfect. Of course, Kate did not have
complete control over the orchestration, except insofar
as she elected to work with Michael Nyman, who did
the string arrangements.

Also, although IED has gone to some trouble to explain
what he means when he says "Kate's work _is_ perfect" we are
still a little vague about the definition of the word
"perfect"; in other words what does it mean to say
"Kate's work is _perfect_"? Allow me to explain what
_I_ mean by the word, and IED can second my definition
or forward an alternate.

A work is said to be _perfect_ if no small alteration
will improve it. In a strict mathematical setting, this
is the notion of a local maximum in calculus. There may
exist other maximal points, but they must necessarily
be far removed from the one under consideration.

Perfection is of course only defined modulo a listener.

This definition is clear, has a sound theoretical base,
and is workable. It arose in a discussion over Thanksgiving
weekend of Stanley Kubrick's film "A Clockwork Orange",
which has been described as "one of the few perfect
films ever made", which we took to mean that no scene
could be added, deleted, or reworked in such a way as
to improve the film. (In this case, I don't even think
meddling with the soundtrack would do any good. It really
is locally optimized.)

What makes the definition workable is that we can further
define a work to be perfect to the tolerance of our own
perceptions if _we_cannot_conceive_ a way to improve it.
I am implicitly doing this in my judgement of "A Clockwork
Orange". 

So, if anyone wants to deny that one of Kate's songs is
perfect _under_my_definition_, and to submit proof, they
will have to explain just how it can be improved.
In the case of _Reaching Out_, for example, you could
suggest eliminating the "pre-choral refrain", subduing
the strings somewhat, or changing a few words. You cannot
suggest taking the record and flinging it against a
brick wall; this is not a small change. (Conceivably, 
you could argue that deleting a single song is a small
change to the _album_ and might improve it.)

There are precious few songs which everyone will agree
are perfect. There are plenty of songs which _anyone_
can be convinced are not. Pick a song by Bon Jovi. You
can even convince people who like the song that it can
be made better.

I think that Kate may have produced some imperfect songs
in the past seven years. I just can't think what they
might be. I certainly defy anyone to suggest improvements
in, say, "Night of the Swallow", "Get Out of my House", or
"The Ninth Wave".

You can set your own standards of success in how well you
have established the imperfection of a given song. If
your goal is to convince IED, you are probably setting
the bar a little high. You might pick some other subset
of love-hounds and try convincing them.

(By the way, you can suggest restoring the original
words to _The_Sensual_World_, but remember that the
far-from-perfect decision to remove them was _not_
made by Kate!)

---------------------------------------------- julian ---