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BOOKS
Brenda Smith and Robert Thayer Sataloff '71. Choral Pedagogy. (San Diego: Singular Publishing Group, 2000.)
Robert Sataloff '71 is a wonderful example of a Haverford pre-med student who went on to great success as a physician after majoring in the humanities at Haverford - in his case, music. Now a leading otolaryngologist based at Thomas Jefferson University, he has specialized in treating the special and often inscrutable ailments of the professional voice, including those of opera singers, actors, and others who find their "instrument" unresponsive at the worst possible times. Not content to work only on the side of the diagnostician and surgeon, Sataloff has continued his musical studies after graduation; just last year he celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the choir he founded at Jefferson for med students, faculty, and spouses and friends who need music to keep their sanity in a high-pressure profession.
In Choral Pedagogy , Sataloff has moved beyond the high-strung professional and applied the benefits of his research and experience to the amateur singer who is just as much at a loss as an opera star when forced to stop her weekly ritual of singing. Written with choral conductor and singer Brenda Smith and featuring contributions from recognized vocal pedagogues Richard Norris and Richard Miller, the book is designed as a text for choral conducting students. Questions are included at the end of each chapter and are accompanied by suggestions for further reading. The goal is for choral conductors to become sufficiently informed both about how the healthy voice functions, in order to lead their mostly untrained singers into beneficial vocal habits, and to understand enough about pathologies of the un-healthy voice to be able to recognize potential problems in their singers.
While co-author Brenda Smith writes chapters about training voices to sing well in the context of a choral rehearsal (drawing primarily on the principles developed by Wilhelm Ehmann and Frauke Hassemann at Westminster Choir College), Sataloff's own chapters in the book are devoted to the anatomy of the voice, the physiological mechanics of singing, and vocal pathology. As he points out, advances in the technologies available for observing the vocal mechanisms have advanced considerably in the last twenty years. Sataloff's explanations are highly detailed and carefully illustrated with diagrams and photographs.
While the terminology can be challenging for the layperson, Sataloff goes just far enough towards accessibility in his descriptions to make them a useful resource for conductors and singers alike. The straightforward discussion of the mechanics of singing takes a good deal of the false mystery out of an internal coordination which is more difficult to observe than a pianist's hands or a violinist's bow arm. While not encouraging self-diagnosis, his chapter on vocal pathology provides an excellent foundation for developing some confidence in choosing and asking intelligent questions of a physician, as well as the warning signs a choral conductor should be aware of with avocational singers who may have no other contact with a voice teacher. At long last, the care and feeding of the human voice has entered the age of modern medicine, and Choral Pedagogy will prove a useful handbook for those who need to be informed.
- Tom Lloyd Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities for Haverford and Bryn Mawr
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Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg HC '84, both of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, have written an interesting book that introduces modern neuroscience while offering a provocative account of the implications of recent work in this area, by them and others, for understanding mystical and religious experience. d'Aquila (recently deceased) is well-known in the field and Newberg, a collaborator of his in recent years, has established himself as an expert in the mapping of brain activity using the techniques of positron emission tomography and functional MRI. Their recent book appears in the Theology and the Sciences series, which contains several other noteworthy works including a personal favorite of mine, The Faith of a Physicist by John Polkinghorne.
The book begins with an overview which defends the possibility of relating neuroscience and the study of religion, while presenting a respectful perspective on each. Next follows a brief, but quite detailed review of the structure and function of the brain. Here are identified the main structural units of the brain, their interrelations which enable them to process sensory impressions at sequentially increasing levels of analysis and association to prior experience and impression, and the research tools that have enabled scientists to peek in on all of this signal processing.
Lest the reader gather the misimpression that the book will be mostly physiological, the following chapter offers a parallel account of the mind. Even distinguishing between brain and mind is, of course, far from straight-forward, but the authors offer useful characterizations. "The brain is...the bodily organ that allows us to think, feel and receive input from the external world" [while...] "the mind is the name for the intangible realities that the brain produces." The mind, being the nonsubstantive aspect of cognition, is characterized not in terms of structures, but of functions, or cognitive operators, which "allow the mind to think, feel, experience, order and interpret the universe." The binary operator, for example, extracts meaning from experience by ordering reality into dyadic categories, like good and evil, or happy and sad, or friend and enemy, etc. (It is immediately obvious how this operator might figure in religious experience.)
With the groundwork established d'Aquili and Newberg proceed to their main results, presenting: the functioning of the cognitive operators in the generation of myth; the role of liturgy and ritual in inducing unusual cognitive states in which the normal functioning of the primary circuit is detoured in fascinating ways; meditation techniques which facilitate control of these diversions; and the relatedness of these altered states to the so-called near-death experience. Then in the final third of the book the authors look beyond these specifics to present a neurological account of the nature and origin of religion in which the role of each of the cognitive operators in the development of specific theologies is presented, deducing from this a metatheology containing the essence of all of them. This part of the book, which also includes a sophisticated digression on the difficulty of assigning priority to either external reality (the western scientific mind-set) or subjective awareness (the eastern mystical position), is too rich and subtle to be condensed into a brief description. Only caricature could result. You need to read it yourself, and it is worth the not unsubstantial effort.
Where does the reading leave the reader? The intelligent layperson will have been pleased with the way the book opens a window on some truly fascinating questions about ourselves, reality and their surprisingly subtle interrelationship. What if the reader is a scientist who happens also to be religious? Are either of his dual sensibilities offended? No, somewhat unexpectedly they are not. The science in this book, although presented of necessity at a rather basic level, is respectable and compelling, at least to this physicist, even though the full paradigm can as yet be glimpsed only darkly, as it were. What of God? Is there a place for a transcendent entity in the "new"roscience of religion? d'Quili and Newberg respond this way. "...we do not feel in any way that a neuropsychological analysis of theology or mysticism alters their true and possibly transcendant nature. It merely indicates how human beings perceive these phenomena." This open-minded and respectful perspective permeates the book and the underlying research enterprise.
The reader will also appreciate the extensive use by the authors of the insights of many other important thinkers. Schrodinger, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, the Marquis de Sade (you may not have known of his studies of macaques!) and Skinner and a host of others all contribute. In beginning their Epilogue with an excerpt from C. S. Lewis' Footnote to all Prayers, the authors reveal a kindred spirit.
Could the book be improved? Yes, in minor ways. The authors are sometimes repetitive, more so in my opinion than their audience needs. Also, I would have appreciated a bit more background on some of the specific scientific studies on which the work is based. Even going to the primary scientific literature did not fully satisfy this curiosity. I am also (perhaps unduly) sensitive to the casual, i.e. less than precise, use of metaphor in scientific description. For example the authors relate the breakdown/resolution of apparently opposing perspectives that can occur in mystical states to the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. I am unpersuaded, but perhaps readers less hindered by a full understanding of quantum mechanics will find the allusion helpful.
For me personally the reading has been scientifically and religiously enriching. As has happened repeatedly throughout my educational experience, reaching a deeper level of understanding of some natural process, in this case the workings of the human mind, produces for me only greater awe for the reality in which we have been placed and the usefulness of science for elucidating it.
- Lyle Roelofs, Haverford Distinguished Professor of Computational Science
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When Bruce D. Campbell '59 and wife Gail became friends with pioneering journalist and political refugee, Stefan Lorant, in the mid-1970's, they hardly anticipated inheriting the copyright of his most enduring book. However, after Lorant's death in November 1997, at the age of 96, the rights to Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City, considered by some to be "the definitive history of Pittsburgh," fell into the hands of the Campbells.
Bruce, former executive secretary for Pittsburgh Mayor Pete Flaherty, and Gail picked up where Lorant left off in the production of the lengthy volume's fifth edition. The first edition of Lorant's history was published in 1964, ten years after department store mogul Edgar Kaufmann convinced his friend to write a book about Pittsburgh. The 50,000 copies initially published by Doubleday sold quickly. Each of the editions that has followed has been longer than the previous one, retaining the form and content of the first edition while adding a new chapter and photographs detailing recent changes around the city. Bruce capably handles this updating task for the fifth edition, with a chapter covering the revamped Pittsburgh Internationl Airport and plans for new football and baseball stadiums, among other 1990s highlights.
Often admired as the creator of modern photo journalism, Lorant understood the importance of combining words with pictures. For the first edition of Pittsburgh, Lorant commissioned W. Eugene Smith to take the photographs. The new edition represents a hefty, thoroughly comprehensive version of Pittsburgh's interesting history through the words of various contributors and extensive photographs. The story of Pittsburgh is traced from the founding of Fort Pitt through its infamous days as "Steel City" to today. In addition to the book's historical content, the authors effectively include details&emdash;some relevant, some not&emdash;that attempt to get at the true heart and feeling of the city. Amidst details of the Heinz Ketchup dynasty, Andrew Carnegie and Steelers football are photographs and anecdotes recounting the lives of local Pittsburgh residents and families.
On occasion, the volume beytrays its age&emdash;and its genesis in a less-than-PC era; such is the case with photos illustrating "the miniskirt of the seventies," and a two-page spread dedicated to proving that "hardly an office in the city of Pittsburgh is without a beautiful office worker." On balance, however, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City covers an incredibly wide range of topics in describing the details of life in Pittsburgh over the decades. Although the book is not without its peculiarities, it manages to explain the evolution of a city in historical context and in relation to the people, miniskirts and all, who have created it. Within the pages of this generously proportioned volume, the city of Pittsburgh is thoroughly explored as a city, an evolving society, and an American phenomenon.
- Liz Lowry '02
