The First and Last Lesson
The first and last lesson in music, at least according to Philip Glass, is that music is about listening.1 For painting it is seeing, and for cooking, tasting. It is a reminder to makers, who get wrapped up in the technique of making more than in how what they made is received.
So what is the first and last lesson of engineering?
One might think it is testing. Testing is where the assumptions behind a design finally meet something that can prove them wrong. Or one might say engineering is about building, or solving, or designing. But every one of those names something the engineer does. A pilot doesn't test the airplane, she flies it.
Engineering is about using.
That sounds too simple to count as a lesson, which is what makes it the first and last one. Every composer naturally forgets how to listen like a listener, and hears the score instead of the sound.
The trouble with "using" is that it is vague. Listening is a kind of using, and a word that covers both a symphony and a toaster is not much of a lesson. Glass names what the recipient actually does with the work. So what does the user of an engineered system do?
Mostly, nothing. A passenger on an airplane may be sitting in a chair that is moving at 500 miles an hour, but what she is doing is watching The Office. Even a cockpit or a scalpel, which do demand attention, demand it for the task and not for themselves. The pilot's attention is on the sky. The yoke is noticed only when it sticks.
What the engineer labors over is meant to disappear into someone else's purpose. The only way to know whether the labor has disappeared is to use what you built, not as its maker but as a stranger would. A test is no substitute, because the person running it is there to inspect. Everything else, the models, the tolerances, and the tests, is preparation for that moment.
Glass has advice for composers. He thinks they should also perform, because playing a piece forces you to hear it in a way that writing it never does. The engineer's version is to go and be the stranger.
- "Philip Glass First And Last Lesson of Music." The Los Angeles Film School, YouTube. ↩