UC San Diego – Page 10

Dreams That You Dare to Dream

The annual Lytle Scholarship Concerts were inaugurated in 1996 to benefit the Preuss School at UC San Diego, a public college prep charter school for grades 6 through 12. The concerts are specific to a composer (e.g., Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt) or to a musical concept or genre (e.g., gospel tunes, tangos, ragtime, Latin jazz). This format has led to some unusual performances, including one in which five jazz pianists performed on five grand pianos arranged in a circle.

The 23rd Lytle concert, “Jewish Music: From Bessarabia to Broadway” carries on the series’ thematic custom by focusing on the evolution of Judaic musical traditions from roots in Russia and Eastern Europe to such early 20th Century practitioners of popular song as George & Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin. The creativity of Jewish emigres flourished predominantly in New York City, particularly in the Bowery, Lower East Side, and Harlem.

American musical theater – indeed, American popular culture as a whole – was transformed by the efforts of Jewish composers, songwriters, and performers. Themes of suffering and hope, and the tensions between the two, combined with a yearning for social justice to fashion a portrait of a people striving to endure and assimilate in their new home. Perhaps no other song of the era encapsulates these aspirations as poignantly as Somewhere Over the Rainbow, written by Harold Arlen and “Yip” Harburg:

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true…

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I?

The programming of the concert reflects the diversity of the Jewish repertoire, from cantorial songs of worship to jazz to classical forms to popular songs of stage and screen. While many of the works performed arose from, or evoke, a specific time or place, their cumulative effect is universal; a celebration of a rich religious and social heritage, and a reminder of just how much immigrants have contributed to our American identity.

Watch Jewish Music – From Bessarabia to Broadway – Lytle Memorial Concert

Recommended for You

We use recommender system all the time. A website will recommend something to you based on what you’ve watched, listened to, bought or who you’ve friended on Facebook. These systems attempt to predict your preferences based on past interactions.

The systems range from simple statistical approaches like Amazon’s people who bought X also bought Y links, to complex Artificial Intelligence-based approaches that drive feed ranking on sites like Facebook.

Julian McAuley, UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering, explores the modeling techniques behind personalized recommendation technology on the web and the different systems that we encounter.

He reminds us that we often find these recommendations a bit “creepy,” but that actually the recommender system has no human intelligence; it’s really a simple statistical process. They focus on short-term predictions but could they be adapted to make long-term predictions or estimate more subjective qualities? Would that be bad?

Watch How Do Websites Personalize Recommendations for Me? – Exploring Ethics

U.S. and Chinese Grand Strategy

As the former Pacific Fleet Commander for the US Navy, Admiral Scott Swift has spent many years evaluating the United States’ strategy with China. In his view, the US has more in common with China than we have in competition, and competition is not always a bad thing. What does concern him is the erosion of the rules-based global order. Swift defines this global order as a set of rules established at multiple international conferences following WWII, and the institutions created to defend and update those rules, such as international courts.

Swift points to the Scarborough Shoal Standoff as an example of China defying the rules-based global order. In 2012, China and the Philippines got into a dispute over the rights to the Scarborough Shoal, a chain of reefs in the South China Sea. The dispute landed in an international court, which sided with the Philippines. However, China refused to recognize the court’s authority. Swift says China’s defiance sets a dangerous precedent.

As China continues to take its place on the global stage, Swift says one key to maintaining the global order is for the Unites States to develop a grand strategy. He says the key is starting with a broad vision of ourselves and our place in the world. Swift suggests taking inspiration from documents like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence and using language as broad as “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” From there, we can develop regional strategies, and ultimately policy to implement those strategies. But, Swift says before we do that, we have to fix the way we currently do things.

Watch U.S. and Chinese Grand Strategy and the Remaking of the Rules-Based Global Order – Herb York Memorial Lecture

Seven Steps to Building a Best-Selling Brand

Building a brand is about more than spending money on marketing. It’s about how you think about your brand conceptually, and the strategies you employ at every level of your business. That was the message from brand architect and strategist Larry Gulko when he spoke at the Rady School of Business at UC San Diego recently.

Gulko laid out his recipe for success in seven simple steps. His first piece of advice: specialists win, generalist lose. He points to several examples of companies that lost sight of their core business and ended up failing. Gulko told the crowd, “be the Q-tip.” He says it’s a brand unmatched in specialization and name recognition. His next six steps touched on everything from connecting with your customer, to inspiring your employees to be brand ambassadors.

After his talk, Gulko sat down with two UC San Diego alumni-turned-entrepreneurs to learn their brand secrets. Pierre Sleiman is the CEO of Go Green Agriculture, and Suman Kanuganti co-founded Aira, a high-tech company improving the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. Gulko, Sleiman, and Kanuganti have a lot of expertise to share about branding, including why you don’t remember your second kiss, and what that has to do with being a best-selling brand.

Watch Building and Growing Brands with Larry Gulko: Global Business Leadership Forum

Memories, Found and Lost

In his Conductor’s Note for La Jolla Symphony & Chorus’s Celebrating Tradition concert, Music Director Steven Schick observes that “memory flows down two related streams,” the personal and the communal. In this concert’s program communal memory is strongly evoked by Handel’s Messiah, Part 1, drawing as it does upon a story heard around the world for over two millennia. Since its Dublin premiere in 1742 Messiah has become such an integral and cherished part of Christmas tradition that virtually everyone who hears it anew may reflexively summon recollections of prior performances; those recollections are in turn echoes of past cultures that experienced Handel’s music.

Qingqing Wang’s new piece, Between Clouds and Streams (a world premiere), explores the sources and formation of memories in its evocation of the natural world set against the most modern of musical techniques. At times Wang’s observations are arranged as in a musical garden, serene and contemplative, while at other points in the composition she conveys the sense of memory struggling to the surface, as half-remembered and sometimes fragmentary images intrude on the composer’s (and listener’s) thoughts. The overall effect is one of connections drawn and new pathways forged from the old.

Memory can also be a fragile, capricious thing, as evidenced by the inexplicable and undeserved obscurity of Florence Price. Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, performed in 1932 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Chicago World’s Fair, was the first work by an African-American woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. The Chicago Symphony continued to champion Price’s music through the Forties and Fifties, and singer Marian Anderson recorded several of her songs. All together Price composed over 300 works in a variety of forms and was performed widely in America and Europe, yet shortly after her death in 1953 her work fell into obscurity, possibly as a result of changing musical tastes that were not hospitable towards her conservative style. It was only by accident that her vibrant Violin Concerto No. 2 was discovered in an abandoned house, and the La Jolla Symphony’s performance of this nearly-forgotten work serves as an excellent introduction to a remarkable and unjustly neglected composer.

Watch Celebrating Tradition – La Jolla Symphony & Chorus