How *Do* They Do It?

When incremental improvement yields magic

My wife and I saw the opera Turandot by Puccini (most of it was, anyway) at the Kennedy Center in D.C. the other week. I knew nothing about it; she’d seen a more classical version of it, and disliked the new one, which tried to be less old-fashioned European Orientalist by stripping away most of the Chinese ornamentation, placing the story in the industrial era, and dressing the female chorus/extra characters as communist-esque guards. Her opinion was that the Chinese imagery was beautiful, and that the opera isn’t an allegory about authoritarianism, but simply an old folktale. She’s Chinese, so I defer to her.

What I found interesting was how odd opera is an as art form, at least to me. What is it, exactly? The musical scores resemble classical music, which isn’t surprising. But the storytelling and the distinct “numbers” make it quite a bit like a musical. But it isn’t quite that, is it? Here’s a great Reddit thread on the distinction between operas and musicals, and why it’s legitimate but also imprecise. (It reminds me of a similar question I explored a little bit here: are steakhouses restaurants? I love tricky definitions.)

It also seems pretty difficult to run a live opera. There are so many moving parts. I’ve never actually seen a classical music performance, but I’ve listened to Mozart and Beethoven and a few others (my parents used to play it in the car!), and I’m always struck by how impossible it seems that anybody could have sat down and scratched out musical notes that an orchestra could turn into that. It doesn’t seem like anything one person could have done. But of course, it was.

There’s a point here—one I’ve been thinking about a lot since attending the Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati. The key conceit (I don’t mean that in a derogatory way) of Strong Towns is incrementalism—the belief that cities and towns should, because they traditionally did, grow incrementally, step by step, without too much up-front cost and risk. A tiny little ghost town, a thriving small town, and a metropolis are all the same creature, in this frame, with wildly divergent fortunes over time. That’s the power—what Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn calls “spooky wisdom”—of incrementalism. That a thing can be the same thing but vastly different. That a thing can be, over time, more like itself.

I wrote about this idea when I wrote about wine a few months ago, and the difficulty of distinguishing an immature wine industry or region—possibly at the beginning of the long incremental climb to success—from a region that simply can’t be made to produce very good wine:

Virginia, whose output could once have been dismissed as swill, is nearly there. Maryland is not there, nor is Niagara. But over time, perhaps experience will reveal that what appears to be an unsuitable or inhospitable climate is an artifact of not using the terroir properly, which in turn is a consequence of artificially dampening the industry’s ability to mature.

If this sounds a little bit like manufacturing, that’s because, in a lot of ways, the same principles are in operation. An industry is a body of accumulated knowledge. There is a reason the first electronics out of South Korea, or even Japan, were junky, while today a “made in Korea” or “made in Japan” stamp is a mark of high quality. Ditto “Napa Valley.” Maybe one day, “Niagara” or “Maryland” will be, too.

Friendly laws, raw talent and accumulated experience can together produce something almost like magic. You can almost begin to transcend circumstances and conditions; you can almost squeeze water from a rock. Or maybe catch lightning in a wine bottle.

In other words, sampling a bottle from a recently developed, up-and-coming wine region and judging it terrible might be like expecting a child to behave like an adult. In good time.