Through a deep dive into an iconic album, Warren Zanes ’02 (PhD) explores a lost virtue in recorded music.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I’ve written songs almost my entire life. I became part of a roots-rock band, the Del Fuegos, in the early 1980s, when I was 17. I went to college after I left the group and continued to write songs. I was writing songs in Rochester, when I was a student in the visual and cultural studies program. Those actually became my first solo album, Memory Girls.

I’ve been working on a book, just out, about the making of a single album in 1982: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Some records stay with you, and Nebraska has been that for me. It’s mysterious. It’s imperfect and unfinished. And to come out with a record like that when you’ve just been in the top 10 of the popular music charts was unthinkable. I wanted to know why he did it. And answering that question was going to take me years—until I sat down with him and got to ask. And I don’t think he has an answer fully in the can.

The imperfections in the music were significant, and I say this knowing plenty of imperfect records had come before. But that was mostly music that lived out on the margins. This was imperfect music right in the hot center of the marketplace.

One of the things that makes this record a touchstone is that around 1982 recorded music was stepping into the digital era. It was the same year Time magazine’s person of the year was the personal computer. And for music makers, the digital era was when the possibility of making perfect music became more accessible with every passing year.

When people started recording music digitally, they started looking at music as waveforms. Engineers who used to close their eyes and listen were now opening their eyes and looking. And they would see, for instance, where a vocal is off pitch. Or when the drummer starts to speed up.

The problem—and I’m going to label it a problem—is that it became harder to resist fixing the imperfections. I’m not talking about EDM [electronic dance music], which lives on the grid, but music made by human beings playing instruments in a room.

Bruce made Nebraska sitting on his bed and turning songs into recordings on a little cassette. He didn’t mean for them to go anywhere. They were meant to be a reference so he could go rerecord them. Then he said, “I don’t know what happened, but I can’t make this better. I have to put it out like this.”

Musicians did often prefer their demos to the final product. The magic of a demo was that you just focused on the song and getting to know it. There was an absence of scrutiny. In the studio, there’d be an engineer, a producer, a band—everybody looking at you.

I tell people, in addition to Nebraska, go listen to the Beach Boys’ “Wild Honey.” The Beach Boys are known for these gorgeous harmonies, and in “Wild Honey” there’s so much joy and abandon in that vocal. If that were recorded today, the engineer would really work it over.

But sometimes the best, most emotionally resonant music, isn’t perfect. It changes speed. The pitch wavers. And there’s an intimacy to that.

John Levey ’69—casting director on iconic TV shows including ER, West Wing, and others—shares what it takes to be right for a role.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I started my career directing theater. How I got into casting supports the idea that we should all be open to happy accidents. A production I was directing got bad reviews, and it was the first time in my career that I had been publicly criticized for not doing a good job. I went out for a cocktail after the show with Barbara Claman, who was a famous casting director in New York and Los Angeles. She said, “If you’re going to take it this hard, kid, you should come and work for me.” And I did the next Monday. We cast TV, movies, theater, all kinds of stuff, and I got an education by fire.

Sometimes I may have someone in mind for a role, but generally, I’m a big believer in the process. That means you get the script and you read it again and again to get a sense of what’s going on emotionally and intellectually and spiritually for the characters. Then you have a meeting with the writer and the director, called a tone meeting, where we discuss age, gender, race, any specific kinds of things that might be important—or whether none of those things is important. Then I communicate with people who represent actors, they submit actors’ pictures and resumes, I sift through all of that, auditions are set up, and we collaborate with producers, directors, and writers on a decision.

I say being right for a role is like having a good haircut. You never look like you need one, nor like you just got one. You just look natural. George Clooney as Dr. Doug Ross in ER was an example of someone with a good haircut. Ross was a pediatrician, and the idea was he would be someone able to interact with children who are ill, or in pain, or in trouble with a kind of compassionate sense of humor and an ability to reach them at their own level. In his personal life, he was to be unsettled man in his mid-30s and a serial dater. And dashing. We had Clooney in mind immediately, partly because he had what was called a holding deal at Warner Bros.— they owned his services for pilots—but Clooney was also everything shows were looking for back then: the funny, smart, sexy, slightly dangerous, a bit vulnerable, 30-something leading man.

Racial balance was a central focus for casting ER, and I like to think we—the writers, producers, directors and I—valued diversity before it was a mandate. We had tremendous diversity especially in what I dub “the trampoline”—the recurring characters and guest stars. In the case of ER, those were the working people of Cook County General, the ones who inform the show’s character and pace. We were telling raw stories from a big city hospital emergency room, and we were also acutely aware that most of the patients in those settings are the poor and the disenfranchised.

One of the exciting parts of the job is witnessing young talent—and if you can, playing some role in helping them advance their career. A memorable example was when I was casting Growing Pains. We were looking for a young teenage boy to join the cast, and Leonardo DiCaprio was represented by someone I had a good relationship with in those days. She suggested him to me, he came in and read, and eventually was hired for the part. And then he was offered a film, This Boy’s Life. I went to the president of Warner Bros. TV and said we should let him out of his contract to do this job. We weren’t sure if Growing Pains was coming back the next year. If we got picked up for another season, it would help us with promotion. And if we didn’t get picked up, we would be doing a good service for a talented young man. He agreed, and DiCaprio went and did This Boy’s Life and hasn’t looked back in 35 years.

Economist Svenja Gudell ’03, ’11S (PhD) helps consumers make sense of strange times in both markets.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I researched the US housing market at Zillow for just over 10 years, and since last December I’ve been doing the same for the global labor market at Indeed. We live in incredibly interesting times. It’s fascinating for me to be able to see the data, analyze what’s going on—and because at both Zillow and Indeed, the research is geared to consumers rather than economists—I hope provide some insights that are helpful to people.

Housing is an incredibly fundamental need of all of us, and right now the market is, for lack of a better word, nutty. The major trend which has been persistent for years is that the supply of housing is incredibly tight. There aren’t a whole lot of houses available, particularly at the lower end of the cost spectrum. So the competition among buyers is fierce. Sellers are collecting multiple offers and bidding wars are happening that are leading people to go over budget and wave contingencies that ideally they’d want to keep.

In a housing market as tight as what we have, there are going to be some groups at a great disadvantage. Not everyone can take a Thursday afternoon off, look at a bunch of homes, and then say, “Oh, it’s going $200,000 over asking; sure, we can match that.” That makes it very hard for an average buyer to be competitive.

One reason for the housing shortage is that large demographic shifts are pushing more and more consumers into the housing market. Millennials are becoming homeowners and Gen Z, also an incredibly large generation, is entering the market. Since the end of the Great Recession, partly because of these demographic tailwinds, the bottom end of the market has been appreciating faster than the top end.

At the same time, we’ve underbuilt for years. The Great Recession brought on a lasting labor shortage in construction. A lot of people switched out of housing construction. Builders have had a pretty hard time building more, and it really comes down to the L’s: labor is really expensive, land is really expensive, and lumber is incredibly expensive.

The result is that often the math only makes sense for the luxury side of the market, where builders are able to get the return they want. That’s true in the rental market as well. Most of the multifamily construction has been luxury units. So there’s been a shortage at the bottom end of the rental market, and appreciation has been incredibly high.

Federal housing policies have usually supported the demand side through assistance, but the problem now is supply, and that’s harder to fix. A huge tool in the chest is at the local level, through zoning. We need to use it more often to make it easier to build. And to make it cheaper to build.

The labor market is just as nutty as the housing market. After a few decades in which there weren’t enough jobs, we now have an extreme mismatch between supply and demand in which, if every unemployed person were to take a job, there would still be jobs left unfilled. Labor force participation went way down during the pandemic, and while it has come up quite a bit, it’s still down from what it was. I think this is a time of truly fundamental change. People are evaluating what they want from their jobs and what’s important to them. Sometimes they find that they already are in a great job; but the quit rate is extremely high right now—much higher than it’s ever been in recent history. And the turnover has been particularly at the lower end of the market.

For people like new college graduates who are entering the job and housing markets at the same time, the situation is mixed. There are more remote offerings for entry-level hires from employers in the most expensive markets. But many of those jobs are also hybrid, which means you’re still expected to show up in the office during some part of the week.

Some large companies have been setting up satellite offices, so if you want to work at Facebook, you don’t need to show up in San Francisco or Menlo Park. That approach has a lot of benefits for companies, because they’re going to bring more diversity to their applicant pool if they’re able to hire people from different areas.

I do think that remote work will have some interesting side effects in the housing market. For example, I’m a full-time remote worker. I could move back to Rochester, where my cost of living would surely be lower than it is in Seattle. I have coworkers who’ve made those types of moves. Is this just happening on the periphery? Or is there going to be a larger swath of people who can really drive a new trend? I think it’s too soon to tell.

Miguel Fittoria ’12, ’15W (MS), whose job is to facilitate hard conversations, addresses a burning question: Why are so many of us losing our cool?

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

Editor’s note: The New Horizons program for adult musicians celebrated its 30th birthday in 2021. Founded at the Eastman School of Music, it has grown to nearly 200 chapters around North America and Australia.

I work in the Palo Alto Unified School District as part of a 10-person team of student and family engagement, or “SaFE,” specialists. This year I’m also overseeing our virtual independent program, which is an at-home option created in response to COVID. In both roles, I act as a liaison between families and the school. The SaFE program was set up to offer a guiding hand to parents who are low-income, or don’t have a lot of formal education, or don’t speak English—and who need help navigating the school system. On the other hand, the virtual independent program draws heavily from well-educated and affluent families who make up most of the district.

We’re seeing conversations devolve into arguments much more, and more quickly, than we’ve ever seen. Like many of the examples we hear about in the news, or watch on social media, we’re seeing this happen between people who have a relationship that’s at least in part transactional. Not between close colleagues, or family members, or friends, but between people at the school or school district, and people in the community. Individuals are responding to each other quickly, in a kind of fight-or-flight moment.

There’s a lot of frustration stemming from the novelty of COVID, and all the changes and uncertainty around protocols. It’s caused a lot of things to go wrong, both in our own organizations or ones we interact with. In our case, a lot of families have been confused about COVID protocols. Our district accounts for so many different scenarios. And the first day after winter break, we had a bunch of middle and high schoolers in our new online independent program not able to get into their classes. Their schedules weren’t appearing. It was a mess. We got emails and calls from people saying, “What’s going on?” and “Why is this happening?”

When something goes wrong, it’s stressful on both sides. I’m usually on the “customer”-facing side. People want information and they want it now.

But don’t just say, “I’ll call you or I’ll email you back” either. Or forward the message to someone else, or even worse, say “I’ll transfer you.” We all know those stories! Tell the person who you’re going to talk to; for example, “I am going to go talk to the health coordinator;” and then, “I will get back to you as soon as I have the information.” Now the person is informed, and they have a timeline. And they have someone they know, that they’re now in contact with. When we do things that way, people are usually appreciative.

My team and I are always talking about the idea of spillover. We’re already using so much of our mental and emotional energy to hold the stress back, that any statement or comment can lead us to the worst conclusions, to that fight-or-flight reaction. The spillover can be so hard to contain in that moment. But in all our interactions, it’s important to be aware of the spillover effect on ourselves and to realize the strangers we encounter are probably experiencing it in their own lives, too.

This article originally appeared in the winter 2022 issue of Rochester Review magazine.

In November 2019, I qualified for the US Olympic Team Trials in the women’s marathon. I had a pretty short turnaround before the actual trials, which were the following February. But the goal had really been qualifying for the trials. Making the Olympic team is a whole other level. The trials course was definitely harder. I went in knowing that my time wasn’t going to be outstanding. My qualifying time, at the Philadelphia Marathon, was 2:44:14. I finished the trials in Atlanta in 2:55:09.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I certainly didn’t set out with the goal of anything like the Olympic trials. I don’t think I even knew what that was. My goals started small and got more ambitious as I progressed. I ran my first half-marathon in 2008. Then I set the goal of finishing a marathon, and I thought that was going to be it. But then it went well, and I thought, “maybe I can improve my time.” In the marathon, breaking the three-hour barrier is a major milestone, but I actually did not set that as a goal. It just sort of happened after I ran several marathons. I ran a 2:53 in Berlin, when I actually had a pretty bad race, and I thought I could have done better. If I was so sure about that, I thought, “why not target the Olympic trials? Because if I make it, it will be the accomplishment of a lifetime. And if I don’t, I will still have gotten faster. I still will have set PRs [personal records] along the way.”

To help me stay motivated, I’ve always found people to train with, rather than going it alone. Having people around is motivating because you’re seeing them put in the work, so it makes you want to put in the work. It’s also grounding. You suddenly realize that other people also have bad days, whereas if you’re by yourself, it’s easier to think, “Oh my gosh, I’m never going to get there.”

I also think having a coach, no matter what your goal, can be really helpful. A coach can take a lot of the guesswork out. When I’m feeling really tired and a little sore, I can’t really step outside myself and decide: Should I just suck it up and do the workout, or am I risking injury? It’s good to have a guiding force to help you think through things in a less emotional way.

“After every marathon I’ve run, I’ve felt a little bit of a void. This is a common experience after meeting a big goal.”

You feel a void, because you spent all this time and energy and attention on that one thing, and suddenly it’s gone. I’ve had this happen enough times now to know that it’s going to come, but that doesn’t make it easier to get through. And I don’t like to decide too hastily what to do next. For me, that always backfires. I’ve needed to take time to decide what’s going to be meaningful.

Last year, I dealt with that void by thinking about my next goal before the Olympic trials. I knew it couldn’t be another marathon. I needed something completely different. I decided to try a triathlon and signed up for the SOS (Survival of the Shawangunks) Triathlon in New Paltz, New York.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored how important it is to be flexible. The triathlon was supposed to take place last September. It’s now supposed to take place this year, but we’ll see. When I started training, as always, I relied on a group to keep me going. I have some friends who are into cycling, and one of them is in Paris, and one is in Copenhagen. So we all got on our bike trainers and set up a Zoom so that we could ride together virtually. It’s very unlikely we would have done that in normal times.

This article originally appeared in the spring 2021 issue of Rochester Review magazine.

— Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Illustration by David Cowles

Jazz was invented by Black artists in the late 1800s as a combination of harmony and rhythmic and soulful expression.

It was influenced by the Blues, Church and African music mixed with Western European harmony and instrumentation.

Jazz was originally protest music—music with a social message, promoting social change.

Especially in the early part of the 20th century, through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, it was meant to show the brilliance of African Americans in their capabilities of expression, and their ability to play their instruments at a high level of proficiency, and to be able to express themselves in a sophisticated way.

Also important was how a lot of Black artists presented themselves in the 1930s and ’40s, and ’50s.

Artists like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, dressed in suits. Jazz musicians with Blue Note Records, Prestige Records, Impulse Records—Columbia, of course, where Miles Davis was for a long time—those labels, into the 1960s showed musicians impeccably dressed, in suits or tuxedos. This trend continues to this day.

The music really started to go in a different direction in the 1950s and ’60s.

With the civil rights movement, it went hand in hand. In the early 1960s, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln produced the ultimate protest music with We Insist! John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and of course, Nina Simone augmented the moment. Gil-Scott Heron’s and The Last Poets’ social commentary merged jazz and spoken word, which was the roots of hip-hop. People forget about the Jazz and People’s Movement, led by Rashaan Roland Kirk and Lee Morgan as they would stage protests on television talk shows to express the need for “Black Classical Music” to have more exposure in the mainstream.

I recently composed a four-movement piece for the Festival of New Trumpet Music in which I try to capture this history.

It’s called Same Strife, Different Life, meaning it’s the same strife that we’ve always had, but with different generations of Black people’s lives. In the first movement, Slavery, I wanted to exude the pain through my trumpet and chilling sounds through the percussion. In the second movement, about Reconstruction, I wrote a down-home blues, “gut-pocket” type of piece. Reconstruction was a painful experience for Black people, and that’s when jazz began. In the third movement, about the civil rights movement, I wanted to do a Blue Note/Stax type of groove—funky and groovy, with remnants of R&B music, which was just emerging. And for the last movement, with police brutality still going on, I wanted a hip-hop groove. I was really influenced by groups like Public Enemy (PE), Boogie Down Productions (BDP), X-Clan and Brand Nubian.

We’ve lost appreciation of this history, especially in jazz education.

It shouldn’t be exclusively about learning vocabulary, or how to play this lick, or [John Coltrane’s] chord progressions. It should be learning what this music is about. It’s from the heart and soul, and about experience. Courses in Black history and culture should be required for any jazz degree.

Musicians need to have a sense of what Black artists went through, because this history ties into the music.

Miles Davis was beaten by police in front of a club and thrown in jail. Charlie Parker couldn’t get a cabaret card, which allowed musicians to perform in venues throughout the city. Many artists were expatriates, in order to express themselves to the fullest.

There still aren’t many Black students in jazz programs.

I’m glad Eastman is seeing that and wants to make that change. I’m here to help make that change.

This article originally appeared in the fall 2020 issue of Rochester Review magazine.

My interest in languages, and the variations in how speakers sound, developed really early. I was born in Montana and lived in San Diego as a kid. When I was six, we moved to western New York. I could tell that I spoke differently from the people in RACH-ester. I also liked to make my family laugh, by doing impressions of what I saw on television, often based on some nuance or difference in how someone spoke.

I always wanted to work with actors because I’ve always been interested in the performance element—the heightened nature of performance—and I love film and television. I studied linguistics at Rochester and also got involved in Todd Theater and In Between the Lines improv comedy troupe. I thought if I studied language and was also active in performance, I could find a way of tying them together.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I befriended Mark Brummitt, a professor at the Colgate-Rochester-Crozer Divinity School, and when I told him I was interested in languages and dialects, he instantly said, “Have you heard of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London?” And I thought, “That’s oddly perfect.” The Central School, I found out, was where Judi Dench had gone to drama school, as well as many of the most notable practitioners in the voice industry. I applied, got in, and eventually earned a master’s degree from the Central School in voice studies—specifically, about how to work with the voice in performance.

While I was in London, I ended up teaching phonetics and British dialect to British students and specialized in American dialects as well, though a dialect coach has the potential to be asked to teach any dialect or accent. My process for learning an accent is a bit like that of documenting a language. Ideally you meet with someone, a consultant, who is a native of the area; or you watch a lot of video or listen to a lot of audio from that particular region. Then you establish some sort of framework that you know covers the bases. For my work, there’s a story called “Comma Gets a Cure,” which was written by dialect coaches and linguists in the UK and US, that includes every consonant, vowel, and diphthong that exists in English. So you record a native from the region reading that, select words, and a lot of natural, free speech—because people always speak differently when they read. Then, if the actor or voice talent can isolate the sounds, I can help them adjust the sounds to make them consistent and eventually influence their flowing speech in the new target dialect.

“I always wanted to work with actors because I’ve always been interested in the performance element—the heightened nature of performance—and I love film and television. “

While I was in the UK, I also started working with Amazon as a voice coach. For most computerized voices that you hear, there is someone who provided the initial sounds for that voice. To get full coverage for a voice, you need someone to work with the voice talent to get the thousands of things that make up the nuances of the language and the voice clear and consistent, so the end product sounds like a unified voice. I describe the process as a bit like the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when Mike Teavee is sent through WonkaVision. He’s zapped into a million pieces and gets put back together, but smaller. The work is time-intensive, and recording can last weeks, with 30 to 40 hours a week of recording scripts created by linguists and programmers.

I’ve worked on a British version of Alexa, as well as the Samuel L. Jackson voice, the first celebrity voice for Amazon. A lot of the work is about building rapport with the voice talent. I’m the person who has to stop them every time they need to correct something or ask them to repeat something if they were unclear. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, if you will! There’s a lot of back-and-forth banter. I work hard to convey that I’m there to assist, to help them get through moments where they’re gravelly, raspy, or lose their breath or support; or to point out things that sound irregular, or too monotone. It’s a lot of work to speak for six hours a day.

I majored in English at Cornell. Rochester was my top choice for medical school because it had the reputation of having an artsy, diverse student population. I think that’s probably from having the bio-psycho-social model in place before that became de rigueur at every medical school. In my medical school class, we had an opera singer and multiple writing majors from Johns Hopkins.

I ended up in surgical pathology. I taught a lot of medical students and residents and published about 12 papers. And all that time I really liked wine. In 2008 I had the opportunity to make wine on a really small scale, at an urban winery in San Francisco called Crushpad. I jumped in, and I fell in love with it.

Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review

“Wine is part of a total experience. Nobody comes back from their honeymoon or vacation waxing poetic about the vodka.”

They come back and tell you about the wine. Not a week goes by when I don’t get an email from somebody saying, “our granddaughter was born, and we opened a bottle of your wine”—and they send a picture. Or, “we went on this hiking trip, and your wine was the one bottle we carried in our backpack”—and there’s a picture. That’s really special to me.

Wine is also a wonderful mix of science and artistry. I often give talks about harvest chemistry and the parameters that we measure, which are both quantitative and qualitative. I can look at the sugar levels and measure that with a number. I look at the acid levels and quantify it. But on the other hand, you have to walk the vineyard yourself. You have to taste the grapes; look at the clusters and the seeds; chew the seeds and taste them, to assess the quality and maturity of the tannins. You inspect and taste the skins. You taste the pulp and then you spit it out to see if it is separating cleanly from the seeds. I measure, look for, and taste for indicators of harvest maturity.

Monitoring fermentation is a lot like doing rounds with patients. Every morning during harvest, the first thing I do is check on all my tanks. First, I look at the temperature. What was the temperature overnight? Was there a spike? I certainly hope not, because I set a cooling jacket. Then I look at what the Brix [a proxy for sugar content] did overnight. I also see what the cap is doing. Does it still seem firm? Has it fallen down? And of course, I smell the tanks, the juice. Once you assess the tanks, you decide what you’re going to do for the day—a lot like internal medicine. It’s sort of funny that way. In the afternoon, you do the same thing all over again. You make rounds twice a day.

Artisanal winemaking is all about the vineyard. Mass-produced wines come from a broad area and are made in a large production facility. They don’t speak specifically to a site. The fruit that I work with and the growing partners that I have are designed to make a wine that speaks to a particular place. Wines from this vineyard taste like they do because the climate is a certain way, the fog and wind are a certain way, because the bushes that surround the vines are endemic to that place.

I drained and pressed my last tank in early October. It’s always a bittersweet time. Harvest is my favorite time of year, and after that, 99 percent is in the rear-view mirror. No more fruit to sort. Just waiting for my chardonnay to do its thing, ferment in the barrel.

Just weeks after harvest, the Kincade fire burned over 75,000 acres. Fortunately for Bruliam, my wines already were safe in barrel. Actually, 93 percent of Sonoma County was picked before the fire erupted. Nonetheless, lives and businesses were disrupted; homes were destroyed. I hope the national news coverage reminds people to support Sonoma County.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I studied music and Russian studies at Rochester as an undergrad and then did a Fulbright year in Russia. When I came back to Eastman for the PhD program in musicology, I didn’t even know there was a field called sound studies. I had never heard of that. Fortunately, in our first-year graduate student seminar, our professor, Lisa Jakelski, took us through things like gender and music, sexuality and music, race in music—and we had a day on sound studies.

I had just come back from a year in Siberia, and I remember walking around my hometown and having to stop because I heard the sound of crickets. I hadn’t heard that the entire time I was in Siberia. The period of absence really reinforced that sound and made it quite loud, so to speak. So as we were going through the literature on sound studies, all I could think was how sound could place me not only physically but also temporally.

We become conditioned to different listening contexts, and they become part of who we are and how we ground ourselves in a moment in space. When I teach sound studies, I challenge students to go about their business without listening to music and just to listen. What things do they hear? Walking down the street, do they hear construction? How do they know when to cross the street? Is it just by looking at the light that tells you to walk, or is it also from hearing the sound of beeping? Likewise, technologies like Facebook and iPhones use specific sounds for messages and texts. That’s very much a conscious decision on the part of the companies to brand their sonic identity.

Music and sound can tell us a very different story about moments in history than looking at the material or the visual can. I’m researching sonic culture in the Soviet Union, and narratives have really coalesced around material and visual culture. Americans are familiar with the Kitchen Debate—that iconic image of Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev debating the merits of capitalism versus communism while standing outside a model kitchen with fancy American appliances. Who’s got the bigger kitchen, who’s got the nicer appliances?��

Looking at the sonic side of things, if you look at what Soviet citizens are writing and saying about improved appliances like televisions, radios, and record players, you start to see a narrative about a brand-new listening etiquette. People were saying, “We’re glad for the material reforms, but how do we actually be respectful, sonically?” What they often argued was that the Soviet Union was supposed to have a commitment to the health and welfare of the masses that capitalist countries did not. New York was a very popular foil, as “the city that never sleeps.” That’s not healthy. So the view was, how do we have progress but with an awareness of social impact.

I don’t think there’s a single American sonic culture. But I absolutely do think there’s a growing concern for noise abatement in the United States. A growing group of scientists, architects, musicologists, and just ordinary people are calling attention to it. There are things within our control, like the volume on iPods. But many things are out of our control. Restaurants and bars are becoming much louder. There are studies that show that the louder the music at a bar, the more people drink. So some businesses play music more loudly so that people will spend more money.

I live near the [Rochester pub] Old Toad. If I want to have a meaningful conversation, it’s where I’ll go, more often than not. It’s a good little pub. And it’s quieter.

Embrace who you are, but learn to “sprinkle in” a few of the skills of extroverts,” career consultant Jane Finkle ’86W (Mas) tells self-described introverts.

As a master’s student, I had an opportunity to work at Rochester’s career center. That was really pivotal. I ended up doing a career discovery group, and it just generated such excitement and energy.
After I finished my program at the Warner School, I got a job at RIT, worked there for about nine months, and then was recruited to work at the University of Pennsylvania. I oversaw the Wharton Career undergraduate program, but I came from a family of entrepreneurs, so it was always in the back of my mind to do private practice. I’ve been in private practice for 12 years.

American culture leans toward extroversion. And I think that often leaves introverts feeling left out, invisible, or that they may be overlooked for opportunities or promotions.
There are many successful introverts, but there are a lot of clients I’ve worked with who are introverted and feel they’re at a disadvantage. And it’s unfortunate, because they bring a lot to the world and the workplace.

When I first meet with an introvert, instead of saying, “OK, let’s start working on networking,” or some other skill, I always ask them if they’ve ever thought about what’s good about introversion.
We have a conversation about the qualities of introversion that are important to the workplace. And that shifts their sense of who they are in a more positive direction. It doesn’t mean introverts don’t have to take some new risks. But the message is, “embrace who you are.”

I think an important strength of introverts is that they tend to have an ability to concentrate and dig deep.
That often results in creative thinking. If you take time to really think things through, you may come up with a great solution to a problem that adds value in the workplace.

I think that introverts have to be able to integrate, or “sprinkle in,” as I often say, some extroverted skills.
They don’t have to change who they are, but they do have to learn to speak up, promote themselves, and take initiative. Introverts are sometimes more comfortable behind the scenes. So it’s very important when they’re in a work environment that they keep coworkers and the boss up to date with any tasks, problems, or accomplishments.

Introverts who are just starting their careers, such as new college graduates, often feel they won’t know what to say. How do I introduce myself to a network contact? How should I prepare for an interview?
I think one strategy that works really well for introverts is advanced planning. A lot of introverts don’t enjoy networking, but if they first write a script to introduce themselves, they can use their introvert energy to plan in advance what to say. And often they do just fine with reflection, planning, and practice.

As they go through their careers, introverts should make sure they’re connecting with people.
Sometimes they’re just not aware that they need to spend quality time initiating and building relationships. Maybe things aren’t so great at their job. There are ways to develop themselves outside of that organization, through professional associations, where they might serve on a committee, or a nonprofit, where they could serve on the board. These contacts can prove highly beneficial when looking for new opportunities.

I think social media is a gift to introverts.
They can post articles. They can easily introduce themselves to potential contacts. If they’ve won an award or achieved something special, they can post about it. And they can connect with leaders in their field, all in the comfort of solitude.

Extroverts have special challenges, too.
They tend to think and talk at the same time. Extroverts speak more easily and extemporaneously. But just because you talk a lot doesn’t mean you have the best ideas. I think their challenge is to stop and listen, and to listen a little more mindfully.