Music and SOA: Theory and Practice

A good writer can make any subject tolerable, even interesting. I hope to write well enough here to make the subject of this post as interesting as possible.

It's often remarked that music and mathematics seem to fit well in certain people's brains. The great Doug Hofstatdler's Goedel, Escher, and Bach took this and related insights to a sublime height.

As a music and math person, I've never seen or felt the connection. Yes, both use abstract, universal symbols. Both require superific concentration. Both are easy to appreciate and impossible to master.

Yet I think the music-math brain is a statistical coincidence. I've known a lot of great pianists who can barely add and a few mathletes who couldn't carry a tune with a forklift.

I do, however, see an important intellectual connection between a certain type of music and a certain type of enterprise IT. The music is that of Anton Webern, an early 20th century composer. The enterprise IT construct is today's SOA.

My friends and I were invariably able to clear the dorm room in college when we put on the Mahler around midnight. Most people just couldn't hang, had no willingness to watch us music geeks revel in the subtleties and bombast of the magnificent Gustav. So I know I better keep things moving here as I approach the even more difficult Anton Webern.

So let's leap forward first to the SOA part of the discussion. The keys to building a SOA, as we know, are identifying and liberating/decoupling services from within applications, loosely coupling (and later, perhaps composing) them into desired functionality, orchestrating them, then governing them so they do what you want them to do.

This approach is remarkably similar to the one Webern took with his compositions around 100 years ago.

The early 20th century was a revolutionary time in the worlds of art, music, and literature. The 19th century's beautiful scenes of people and places became abstract representations of inner psyche. The weighty lyricism of Yeats turned into the despairing way the world will end with TS Eliot.

And in music, a centuries-long melodic tradition turned into the deconstructed, compressed forms of what were known as the Second Viennese School composers.

If you don't know Webern, just go to wikipedia, you'll find a few seconds of sound there. If you want more, fear not, his typical pieces run six to nine minutes, a fraction of Mahler's 90-minute Mahler symphonies or Wagner's hours-long operas.

Yet Webern compressed a world--and worldview--of music into those precious few minutes. The music has its own spare beauty, to be sure, but is not something that anyone could bear on a large scale. It is, to think in modern business terms, efficient.

The theory behind Webern's music is fascinating to those who like this sort of thing, but the theory is useless if the guy couldn't write good music. Webern could.

The key thing to remember is that Webern took traditional elements--melody, harmony, meter, and texture--tore them apart (liberated/decoupled them), then put them back together in a spare format that appears almost random (or maybe loosely coupled) on paper but is actually composed with great structural unity and flow.

The governance in this case, is of course, the conductor, without whom the piece would quickly dissolve into a fibrillating heap when performed.

The end result is music that still sounds "weird" to most ears even today, yet grows on one more and more. Yet I annoint Anton Webern the intellectual Father of SOA. His principles are being practiced, knowingly or not, by SOA practitioners worldwide today.

As with Webern, the SOA gang's work can be difficult to explain in theory and effectiveness, difficult to master, and represents an enormous threat to the old ways of seeing and doing things.

I'll stop the analysis right there. The slippery slope of comparing Webern with music created 50 years on either side of him looms before me, as does the chasm of convincing anyone but the earliest adapters that I'm making sense here.

The analogy cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon my blogpost.