Playing the Sea-Changes

A phrase that turns up far too often in legal briefs and business management texts is "orchestrating a sea change."   I have to object.  Not so much to the notion of a sea change (or seachange or sea-change) which is a lovely notion, and even more so for its inherent ambiguity.  It seems that the term doesn't appear earlier than in Shakespeare's Tempest, when Ariel sings (in "Full Fathom Five") ...Nothing of him that doth fade, /But doth suffer a sea-change,/into something rich and strange,... to Ferdinand, reporting on the apparent death by drowning of Ferdinand's father.  Here the change wrought by the sea is personal but significant, but the term can, in fact, describe change in two dimensions, one of scale and one of speed, for the observed actions of moving water can push flotsam and jetsam onto a beach in a blink or smooth a small stone or shape the edge of a continent over years or millennia, or with a sudden great flood or tidal wave make changes of frightening scale.

(I can't help but add this passage by the late mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, in part describing his working method: "La mer s’avance insensiblement et sans bruit, rien ne semble se casser rien ne bouge l'eau est si loin on l'entend à peine ...Pourtant elle finit par entourer la substance rétive, celle-ci peu  à peu devient une presqu’île,  puis une île, puis un îlot, qui finit par être submergé à son tour, comme s’il s’était finalement dissous dans l’océan s’étendant  à perte de vue...[...] C’est ‘l’approche de la mer’, par submersion, absorption, dissolution – celle où, quand on n’est très attentif, rien ne semble se passer à aucun moment: chaque chose à chaque moment est si  évidente, et surtout, si naturelle, qu’on se ferait presque scrupule souvent de la noter noir sur blanc, de peur d’avoir l’air de bombiner, au lieu de taper sur un burin comme tout le monde...C’est pourtant la l’approche que je pratique d’instinct depuis mon jeune âge, sans avoir vraiment eu à l’apprendre jamais." )

Yes, sea-change is a great pairing of words, so all the shame to have it get moored down as business jargon, and particularly so when the mooring is done by the verb "to orchestrate."  Do we really need this additional reduction, no, discounting of the art of orchestration to an act of technocratic or bureaucratic manipulation?  He orchestrated a sea change in the office supply market.  Or:  She was widely seen as orchestrating a sea change in personnel management through the strategic adoption of the "Human Resources" label for her specialization.  These sentences wouldn't have the same effect if the word "composing" replaced "orchestrating", would they?  Why does "to compose" continue have the soft edge and caché of the creative while orchestration handles a skill, a routine, and certainly nothing frightening  (and yes, nothing is more frightening than the creative (remember "Dick" Cheney's worst epithet for the 9/11 highjackers was that they were creative? (Which was, incidentally, the same assessment that Karlheinz Stockhausen made and was skewered for making!))

I'd like for my own composing — of which orchestration is an integral, not separable, part — to aspire to making sea-changes.  To the degree that a new piece can challenge me — and possibly others — to hear in some new way, then it sometimes even succeeds.  I certainly have gratitude and envy towards my colleagues who, to my ears. are to be able to make their own sea-changes even more reliably!