Rx for the Anchoring Bias in Music

By superior craft and musicianship, Paradise Is There, Natalie Merchant’s recent remake of her best-selling album, Tigerlily, has freed many of her listeners from their hard cognitive wiring to the earlier recording. That is no mean feat considering the infectious power and popularity of Tigerlily—a commercial and artistic success that two decades ago enthralled several million listeners.  

Put another way, Paradise has released us from many of the cognitive “anchors” that accompanied the earlier recording.  Once accepted and ensconced, anchors lock in normative elements and expectations for discourse, discussions, negotiations, and, yes, music. Tough to dislodge, they can bias and blind us to alternatives. (Read about anchoring biases here).
In music, listeners who internalize a favorite recording or performance adopt specific cognitive and emotional expectations. That can bring great joy and appreciation of musical nuances. It can also blind listeners to other interpretations, other performances.


Pull up the Roots
Through musicality and virtuosity, Paradise pulls up more than a few of Tigerlily’s entrenched anchors.  Recorded twenty years later, the remake is predominantly acoustic. A string quartet, acoustic bass, piano, accordion, and tenor sax complement uncommonly nuanced vocals. Merchant’s voice—an unselfish vehicle for her enduring songs—radiates extreme comfort in its own skin. 


An “old soul” when she crafted those songs in her early thirties, Merchant wrote them for adults (herself included). The songs endure as explorations of love and loss, chance and fate, obstacles and personal growth, shades of grey. Her ode to grey (my own personal favorite)—I May Know the Word— has the pacing and gravitas of a late Beethoven adagio. Quite an accomplishment for a thirty-year old who had just parted company with a progressive rock band (10,000 Maniacs). 

A new recording, of course, comes with a new set of anchors. Will I be up to task if Natalie Merchant unveils a third rendition some time down the road? My one request: No need to wait twenty years, but please, Natalie, cut me some slack in savoring my share of Paradise.

Do We Really Deserve a Netrebko Effect? A Rollins Effect?

Anna Netrebko

In 2007, the outstanding American tenor Brandon Jovanovich won the annual Richard Tucker Award, reserved for “an American singer poised on the edge of a major national and international career.” Past Tucker honorees include Renee Fleming, Jennifer Larmore, and Stephanie Blythe; so Mr. Jovanovich’s accomplishment was no small beer.

Yet, on November 15, in an article by Associated Press veteran reporter Mike Silverman, we learned that “Brandon Jovanovich, a young American tenor” fell victim to what Silverman described as The Netrebko Effect. The bottom line: In a variety show opera gala on behalf of the Richard Tucker Foundation, Brandon had the misfortune of following performances by the charismatic, supremely gifted soprano Anna Netrebko not once but twice. You can read the performance details here. The review offered advice as well as faint praise:

“. . . try to make sure you don’t go on right after Anna Netrebko,” cautioned Mr. Silverman. . . “Jovanovich followed, singing an aria from Lehar’s last operetta, Gluditta, with ardor and impressive volume. But it inevitably seemed a bit anti-climactic.”

A Rollins Effect? It also sparked my recollection of a 1989 Times review when the saxophonist Branford Marsalis sat in at Carnegie Hall with Sonny Rollins and his quartet. Marsalis, an accomplished reed man,  proved no match for the Saxophone Colossus. Times reviewer Jon Pareles was there:

The Rollins Effect? Poor Mr. Marsalis. When he joined the [Rollins] group, offering solos that would sound thoughtful and shapely elsewhere, Mr. Rollins outgunned him with a mixture of raw vitality and a higher calculus of harmony. . . It was no shame for Mr. Marsalis to be outplayed; when Mr. Rollins is in such remarkable form, hardly any musician alive could keep up with him.”

A Psychological Basis for the Effect. Brandon and Branford tasted collateral damage via two related biases that cognitive psychologists insist alter judgment: anchoring and the contrast effect. Experience exceptional quality, and it will become your perceptual and judgmental reference point (i.e., anchor), casting a halo that accentuates the contrast with whatever immediately follows. Pour me a glass of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1945 and the magic of a subsequent quaff of Ripple will be agonizingly diminished. (apologies to Fred Sanford)

Be Careful What You Wish for. Please tell us, Mr. Silverman, that in coining the Netrebko Effect you did not aspire to invest it with generic status. It doesn't work in the business world. Companies dread of having products so dominant that their brand names become generic. That can vitiate the uniqueness of those brands and ultimately threaten the sanctity of their copyrights. (A sure sign of the affliction is when a product name morphs into a verb—I xerox pages, You spackle walls, Ex-wife spams Wig & Pen.)

Although The Netrebko Effect does evoke the nomenclatural mystique of a Cold War chess ploy, it, like Googling between the sheets, might unlock a bees’ nest of bad vibes. Imagine Angela Gheorghiu discovering in the morning papers that her Netrebko-quality performance as Mimi the previous night had eclipsed her estimable costar, Ramon Vargas.

Would tangled up in Netrebko prove a back-handed compliment?--a distinction that might provoke her to trill:

Ramon was good, I was great .   .   . Netrebko is better still!

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