The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chapter Five, Strategic Military Power

Sun Tzu opens this chapter by revisiting the idea that commanding a large number of troops is like commanding a few.  He implies that success in many ventures depends on assigning the right person to the right task, which is an area where American business model has utterly failed.  Think of all the liberal arts majors who ended up with useless college degrees and how most of their talents have been wasted in a string of dead end office and service jobs -- rarely was any one of them trained for the exact job they ended up doing.  Multiply the disillusioned collegiate by millions and we have the smoking wreck that is the American office, a scene I would have happily been homeless to avoid after having a taste of it in my tender years after graduating musical college.



Sun Tzu continues by talking about the power of the orthodox and the unorthodox.  In business, the orthodox boils down to the Golden Rule: do unto others, don’t screw those you are working with, treat your customers and workers fairly.  This rule applies whether you are a struggling small business owner like me or a corporate giant.  The unorthodox part is what we do within the confines of those rules.  Innovating a better product or service is unorthodox.  Figuring out ways to make workers productive and happy, something which lacks greatly in the American office cesspool, requires unorthodox thinking.  Once the structure is erected, then we get to play.



Sun Tzu says: “The notes do not exceed five, but the changes of the five notes can never be fully heard."  Rules and structure are essential in work and in music.  The saddest, most unintentionally funny musical abortions of all time are atonal music and its idiot nephew, musique concrete.  Atonal music is the ultimate cart before the horse.  When early 20th century edgelords attempted to re-invent chromaticism by forcing a structure where coherent melodic and harmonic patterns could not exist, they made the musical equivalent of Cecilia Jimenez’s ruined Jesus.





For those who aren’t aware of the story, Jimenez was 81 years old at the time she volunteered to restore her church’s fresco portrait of Jesus.  By the time she was done with it, Jesus looked like a ten year old’s impressionistic canvas of Cornelius from Planet of the Apes.  To add insult to injury, Jimenez arrogantly refused to apologize for her aberration in any significant manner and asked for a chunk of the profits from tourists who paid to gawk at the ruined artwork.  



Limits make for beautiful art, and the limits of fresco are especially severe.  Fresco is a weird set of techniques that cannot be mastered without at least 10,000 hours of training; I think it is safe to say these are hours Jimenez did not put in during her eight decades on the planet.



Just be glad she didn't get a chance to "restore" this one...

In Western music, we have a twelve note scale and what boils down to three main chords, I, IV, and V.  The atonalists Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern thought they were being clever when they “broke” tonality by forcing a new form of music composition called serial music.  Serial music is composition via tone rows, which takes Math for Dummies and applies it to the 12 note scale to deliberately randomize it.  The result is music without coherence that always sounds like a horror movie soundtrack no matter what instruments are used to create the piece.  Musique concrete is almost always a bunch of random creepy haunted house sounds interspersed with the computerized version of intestinal gas.  That is to say, it sucks.


“Thus the strategic configuration of power of those that excel in warfare is sharply focused, their constraints are precise," says Sun Tzu. 

The beauty of a John Prine song is its limits.  The chords he plays on his guitar aren’t especially exotic.  Every now and then he’ll use a secondary dominant, but that’s a common enough chord usage that it is featured in Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday.  His whole illustrious career, from its beginnings in the Chicago suburb of Maywood to his death in Nashville, was based on singing while strumming a guitar.  Like a fellow music icon, Johnny Cash, he wasn’t a fan of overcomplexity.  Prine’s unorthodoxy was his especially beautiful voice, exquisitely crafted lyrics, and the X factor.  The X factor, that undefineable je ne sai quois that makes John Prine’s music great, is what he did within the strict confines of song form.  His music may have been quieter and less edgy than Berg’s screechy operas and Schaefer’s sampled train commute, but he knew instinctively that limits are power, and for that, Prine’s songs are much more likely to survive into the distant future... thank the gods!