26 March 2012
Same Difference (iii) – some comic relief re: the fashion issue
I haven't ventured to L.A. all that much since I've been at CalArts, but when I have, the heightened importance of grooming has frequently been in evidence. The first time I saw a musician sporting the more or less archetypal musico-hipster outfit from the neck down in combination with the perfectly trimmed goatee and freshly styled hair of an accountant, I knew I wasn't in Kansas (or Minnesota) anymore.
10 March 2012
Same Difference (ii)
From an early stage in my musical development, I refused to embrace the expression of anything in particular as a worthy goal for music (mine or others'), and I haven't given much ground in the intervening years. It was at first merely a fact that I had not consciously or intentionally endowed any of my music with extra-musical content; only later did I become convinced through experience (can we just call it common sense?) that reverse-engineering the emotional impact of a particular piece on a particular person for the purpose of reconstituting it at will was, regardless of my own degree of interest in doing so, an absolutely impossible task. Such it is that "expression" in the colloquial sense in which that term is used by musicians and music-lovers remains more or less beyond the pale in my own work. Taken in the very most imprecise, deconstructed, overbroad sense, however, I'm not sure I can deny it completely.
My own social alienation has never been as simple as just being a painfully shy kid. I am a "blender," a "fly on the wall" almost wherever I go; I hear lots of things not meant for my ears; I startle roommates working in the kitchen who didn't see or hear me approach; I can sit at a bar for 20 minutes and not get served. When I stop to consider whether all of this might be, as most anyone I might relate this to is bound to respond, "all in my head," that it is more or less universal to the human experience and that what makes me different is not so much that it happens to me as how it affects me, I simply can't convince myself. Pushing 30, I'm both more convinced than ever that it's real and more disappointed than ever that I haven't managed to parlay this unteachable skill into a more lucrative and exciting career as an international jewel thief or double agent. It's getting harder and harder, though, to imagine that the career choices I have made cannot be partially explained in this way either.
To play tuba under these conditions is to both transcend and compound the problem. Depending on the acoustic and social environments at hand, the instrument may command undivided attention or it may be exceptionally easily ignored. It may be painfully loud or completely inaudible. In attempting complete musical statements where incomplete ones are no less than idiomatic and conventionalized, you will either wildly exceed the audience's expectations in your success, or, paradoxically, reinforce them even more strongly in failure at this loftier task than you ever could have by simply attempting that which they will continue to expect. I find that this mirrors my social experience quite closely, and if that does not really explain why I first became a tuba player, I think it might explain, at least in part, why I am still a tuba player today. You have to learn to live with your successes and failures alike being met with indifference; with being too loud for one kind of music you love and too quiet for another, and with being happy enough if someone so much as notices that one or the other is the case. These are not good feelings, but I knew them quite well from the hallways, the school bus and the baseball field long before I knew that music was my calling. So here I am, relatively unharmed, but not entirely at peace either.
The tuba is big and shiny and low and loud, superficial qualities which might get you noticed for a second, but won't hold anyone's attention much beyond that. Indeed, there's music (art, we hope) to be made on the tuba, and also on hundreds of other instruments. Art will not get you noticed by very many people, of course, but the few who do engage with your work will remember it for a long time. And as any good student of Music Business will tell you, the extent to which you are "different" is more or less directly proportional to the duration and intensity of this memory. This much, I think, was clear to me from the outset, if not on the most elementary, intuitive level, and I would not aspire to mislead anyone based on the first entry in this series that this was not the case. It may even be fair to say that my work on some abstract level represents an "expression of difference," in other words, something people actually notice even as I myself remain (socially) easy to ignore. What I simply can't abide are the more concrete, overbearing, self-absorbed forays into this realm, the ones which simply shove this supposed "difference" that all of us artists suffer with right in the audience's proverbial face, necessarily dragging along those trivial personal details which are its necessary vessels of delivery. Are we not already different enough simply for making art, regardless of its content? And really, don't we like it that way?
My own social alienation has never been as simple as just being a painfully shy kid. I am a "blender," a "fly on the wall" almost wherever I go; I hear lots of things not meant for my ears; I startle roommates working in the kitchen who didn't see or hear me approach; I can sit at a bar for 20 minutes and not get served. When I stop to consider whether all of this might be, as most anyone I might relate this to is bound to respond, "all in my head," that it is more or less universal to the human experience and that what makes me different is not so much that it happens to me as how it affects me, I simply can't convince myself. Pushing 30, I'm both more convinced than ever that it's real and more disappointed than ever that I haven't managed to parlay this unteachable skill into a more lucrative and exciting career as an international jewel thief or double agent. It's getting harder and harder, though, to imagine that the career choices I have made cannot be partially explained in this way either.
To play tuba under these conditions is to both transcend and compound the problem. Depending on the acoustic and social environments at hand, the instrument may command undivided attention or it may be exceptionally easily ignored. It may be painfully loud or completely inaudible. In attempting complete musical statements where incomplete ones are no less than idiomatic and conventionalized, you will either wildly exceed the audience's expectations in your success, or, paradoxically, reinforce them even more strongly in failure at this loftier task than you ever could have by simply attempting that which they will continue to expect. I find that this mirrors my social experience quite closely, and if that does not really explain why I first became a tuba player, I think it might explain, at least in part, why I am still a tuba player today. You have to learn to live with your successes and failures alike being met with indifference; with being too loud for one kind of music you love and too quiet for another, and with being happy enough if someone so much as notices that one or the other is the case. These are not good feelings, but I knew them quite well from the hallways, the school bus and the baseball field long before I knew that music was my calling. So here I am, relatively unharmed, but not entirely at peace either.
The tuba is big and shiny and low and loud, superficial qualities which might get you noticed for a second, but won't hold anyone's attention much beyond that. Indeed, there's music (art, we hope) to be made on the tuba, and also on hundreds of other instruments. Art will not get you noticed by very many people, of course, but the few who do engage with your work will remember it for a long time. And as any good student of Music Business will tell you, the extent to which you are "different" is more or less directly proportional to the duration and intensity of this memory. This much, I think, was clear to me from the outset, if not on the most elementary, intuitive level, and I would not aspire to mislead anyone based on the first entry in this series that this was not the case. It may even be fair to say that my work on some abstract level represents an "expression of difference," in other words, something people actually notice even as I myself remain (socially) easy to ignore. What I simply can't abide are the more concrete, overbearing, self-absorbed forays into this realm, the ones which simply shove this supposed "difference" that all of us artists suffer with right in the audience's proverbial face, necessarily dragging along those trivial personal details which are its necessary vessels of delivery. Are we not already different enough simply for making art, regardless of its content? And really, don't we like it that way?
24 February 2012
Same Difference (i)
There are several different ways to explain "The Hipster Thing" as some here at CalArts have called it. One is as a contrived expression of supreme coolness: "I'm soooo cool that I still look cool in the most uncool clothes and grooming conceivable." Another is as an honest aesthetic predilection for said clothes and grooming instantiated in a particularly overbearing way. A third would be as having become the default universal identifier of "artists" to each other, a secret handshake of sorts, except that it's, you know, not a secret or a handshake. A fourth would be the naive, accidental (and, as I might self-interestedly argue, authentic) way of actually being just this uncool and actually owning a wardrobe just this tattered, yet being so comfortable-verging-on-narcissistic in your own skin (as well as oblivious to and/or generally contemptuous of the judgment of others) that you just don't give a fuck, and hence are so uncool that you can pass for cool based on novelty alone.
Does the contemporary popularity of these various modes of appearance not make it all too clear that their pioneers, who initially more truly viewed them as anti-fashions, and at that most of all for their supposed inability to be Capitalistically co-opted or gain bourgeois acceptance, and could more reasonably in their historical moment than in ours expect them to succeed as such, in fact failed miserably at all of this? To be sure, most all of the intentional fashions one sees at CalArts are retro in some respect; this is, yes, a thoroughly postmodern situation by which there seems to be little or no discernible present-day instance of Fashion beyond this mere potpourri of previous styles, each clearly identifiable by decade (and probably ultimately by year if you've payed more attention to pop culture than I have).
The common denominator, of course, between the pathways to Hipsterism given above is difference. Artists are different. We are both alienated and entitled. Our childhoods and adolescence, despite reflecting the bourgeois privilege of our upper-middle class families, were traumatic. In Kindergarten, making art was fun and everyone did it; by fourth grade, it was perfunctory; by seventh grade, peculiar; and by high school, it was downright dangerous. By college, even the master teachers and intellectuals we had escaped to, who supposedly had our best interests in mind and were being remunerated accordingly, had begun imposing stylistic restrictions, railing against the philosophies we had built our lives around, and prodding us to expunge the last traces of the adolescent naivete which had been our artistic inner flame if it threatened to prevent us from earning a living through our work. Art was no longer either a proper vocation or even a timely diversion. Difference, once a mere value-neutral distinction between two things, had in fact become a question of normalcy and pathology, and the moment we had realized we couldn't do anything else was the precise moment we realized this change had occurred.
Or was it (gasp...) the other way around?
It might come as a surprise to some that as an artist myself, I curse my own difference every day. If I am in any respect rebellious, complicated, difficult, unapproachable, this is because my sense of ethics tells me that the alternative is bad news, not because I do not have the same hopes, dreams and desires as a normal, healthy human being. Fitting in is only unattractive to me because of what it would mean under the present political, economic, social and cultural circumstances; all else being equal, I cannot sit here and say I wouldn't take it if I thought I could have it.
This is, needless to say, not the prevailing attitude I detect here at CalArts. More specifically, it is the opposite attitude. I think that the "present conditions," so to speak (all of them, everywhere, now), besides being difficult and unfortunate, also create a desperate need to distinguish oneself in any way possible. In that sense, it is no longer different to be different; rather, it is what everyone seems to want...and yet more acutely now that everyone seems to want it. I fear, above all, that art is little else to these children besides just another way to achieve this; that it is, really, no more genuine than the ridiculous outfits they wear, and serves no greater purpose in their lives.
And how could it be? What else here is authentic enough to so much as permit other authenticities to exist anywhere around it? What better exemplification of the folly of the academic art world than to bring together all of the "different" kids, find that they are all the same, and then watch them writhe aimlessly trying to recover their difference, or failing that, to create it from thin air? It is an unfortunate symptom of the overall condition of our culture that art has become more or less an inherently alienating act. Be this dynamic as it may somewhat inescapable, we nonetheless acquiesce to it at our own peril.
Does the contemporary popularity of these various modes of appearance not make it all too clear that their pioneers, who initially more truly viewed them as anti-fashions, and at that most of all for their supposed inability to be Capitalistically co-opted or gain bourgeois acceptance, and could more reasonably in their historical moment than in ours expect them to succeed as such, in fact failed miserably at all of this? To be sure, most all of the intentional fashions one sees at CalArts are retro in some respect; this is, yes, a thoroughly postmodern situation by which there seems to be little or no discernible present-day instance of Fashion beyond this mere potpourri of previous styles, each clearly identifiable by decade (and probably ultimately by year if you've payed more attention to pop culture than I have).
The common denominator, of course, between the pathways to Hipsterism given above is difference. Artists are different. We are both alienated and entitled. Our childhoods and adolescence, despite reflecting the bourgeois privilege of our upper-middle class families, were traumatic. In Kindergarten, making art was fun and everyone did it; by fourth grade, it was perfunctory; by seventh grade, peculiar; and by high school, it was downright dangerous. By college, even the master teachers and intellectuals we had escaped to, who supposedly had our best interests in mind and were being remunerated accordingly, had begun imposing stylistic restrictions, railing against the philosophies we had built our lives around, and prodding us to expunge the last traces of the adolescent naivete which had been our artistic inner flame if it threatened to prevent us from earning a living through our work. Art was no longer either a proper vocation or even a timely diversion. Difference, once a mere value-neutral distinction between two things, had in fact become a question of normalcy and pathology, and the moment we had realized we couldn't do anything else was the precise moment we realized this change had occurred.
Or was it (gasp...) the other way around?
It might come as a surprise to some that as an artist myself, I curse my own difference every day. If I am in any respect rebellious, complicated, difficult, unapproachable, this is because my sense of ethics tells me that the alternative is bad news, not because I do not have the same hopes, dreams and desires as a normal, healthy human being. Fitting in is only unattractive to me because of what it would mean under the present political, economic, social and cultural circumstances; all else being equal, I cannot sit here and say I wouldn't take it if I thought I could have it.
This is, needless to say, not the prevailing attitude I detect here at CalArts. More specifically, it is the opposite attitude. I think that the "present conditions," so to speak (all of them, everywhere, now), besides being difficult and unfortunate, also create a desperate need to distinguish oneself in any way possible. In that sense, it is no longer different to be different; rather, it is what everyone seems to want...and yet more acutely now that everyone seems to want it. I fear, above all, that art is little else to these children besides just another way to achieve this; that it is, really, no more genuine than the ridiculous outfits they wear, and serves no greater purpose in their lives.
And how could it be? What else here is authentic enough to so much as permit other authenticities to exist anywhere around it? What better exemplification of the folly of the academic art world than to bring together all of the "different" kids, find that they are all the same, and then watch them writhe aimlessly trying to recover their difference, or failing that, to create it from thin air? It is an unfortunate symptom of the overall condition of our culture that art has become more or less an inherently alienating act. Be this dynamic as it may somewhat inescapable, we nonetheless acquiesce to it at our own peril.
31 December 2011
Survey: Should This Blog Be Hosted Elsewhere?
I want the honest of opinion of anyone who happens to read this.
I have a sentimental attachment to Blogger, and I utterly loathe the thoughts of changing the URL of my blog, redirecting readers through to the new one with a postdated entry, and losing whatever perception of accomplishment comes with displaying a five-year archive of overwrought vitriol in the right sidebar, BUT...this shit is starting to drive me bonkers. Simplicity is golden, inflexibility is lethal. While I have no use for fancy embedded media players or dancing Flash-animated tubas in the background, I'm sick to death of length limitations on comments, labels, titles and even, I just discovered, the total length of posts that are displayed on the home page, which evidently I've managed to exceed for the first time this Blog Month. Starting tomorrow, this monstrosity SHOULD display the complete month of December in chronological order (i.e. backwards from blogging standard practice). Not allowed. According to what I dug up, someone hacked the chronology stuff years ago, but a recent update to Blogger caused this to stop working. And fuck jump breaks. Jump breaks are for 13 year olds who only want to read the first paragraph to see if it's something they can plagiarize for their book report.
I've never used Wordpress. It looks too fancy and I'm afraid I'll like it too much. I don't know what its limitations may or may not be, how much you get for free, or how intuitive the interface is. I suppose it would be easy enough to find out. It's not comforting to know that the people who work for Google are plenty smart enough to design something state-of-the-art but choose not to. So tell me, if you have an opinion, whether you think I should stay here or go there. I'm listening.
I have a sentimental attachment to Blogger, and I utterly loathe the thoughts of changing the URL of my blog, redirecting readers through to the new one with a postdated entry, and losing whatever perception of accomplishment comes with displaying a five-year archive of overwrought vitriol in the right sidebar, BUT...this shit is starting to drive me bonkers. Simplicity is golden, inflexibility is lethal. While I have no use for fancy embedded media players or dancing Flash-animated tubas in the background, I'm sick to death of length limitations on comments, labels, titles and even, I just discovered, the total length of posts that are displayed on the home page, which evidently I've managed to exceed for the first time this Blog Month. Starting tomorrow, this monstrosity SHOULD display the complete month of December in chronological order (i.e. backwards from blogging standard practice). Not allowed. According to what I dug up, someone hacked the chronology stuff years ago, but a recent update to Blogger caused this to stop working. And fuck jump breaks. Jump breaks are for 13 year olds who only want to read the first paragraph to see if it's something they can plagiarize for their book report.
I've never used Wordpress. It looks too fancy and I'm afraid I'll like it too much. I don't know what its limitations may or may not be, how much you get for free, or how intuitive the interface is. I suppose it would be easy enough to find out. It's not comforting to know that the people who work for Google are plenty smart enough to design something state-of-the-art but choose not to. So tell me, if you have an opinion, whether you think I should stay here or go there. I'm listening.
Flavor of the (Final) Month
Year-end retrospectives are everywhere, and jazz critics in particular seem to love them some list making this time of year. It always gets me thinking: how many times have they actually spun each of these records? Did they audit them on $1000 speakers or in the car on the freeway? And how many other new releases have they spun this year? How many times? Where?
Musicians are prone to wondering these things when it comes to questions of critical authority, but I wonder also out of a bit of insecurity. I haven't acquired or listened to a single record that was released this calendar year. It's quite rare for me to do so any given year, and has been forever. Real or imagined professional obligation as a player, composer, teacher and thinker has compelled me to spend an awful lot of time catching up on things that happened before I was born, and only secondarily on staying "up to date" with the latest developments. Whether I'm winning the battle or not, this is slowly changing: I've acquired many more records released in the 2000's over the last couple of years than I did during the years they were actually released. There's plenty going on today that interests me; it's just so hard to find that it's easier to wait a while and see what people are still talking about at the end of next year. I've learned the hard way that it's safe, nay, essential to ignore flavors of the month during the month in question. That goes for the final month of the year as much as any other.
As for the authority question, I can't imagine putting out a list of my own even if I had done more work. I've found that I need 3 listens to settle on a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down. My opinion changes frequently before that point and almost never beyond it. But to rate a group of albums empirically against each other would require several more hearings of each. And of course, I'm not talking about listening in the car or while making dinner; the music needs to be the sole object of your attention if you're going to claim any authority whatsoever, even to yourself. (When I say "empirically," of course I don't mean "for everyone for all time," but I think that within your own aesthetic, you can certainly be clinical in going about this kind of thing. If you don't, you end up fooled.) This is not at all to say that you are not listening for pleasure or that you are otherwise contriving some foreign mode of perception; indeed, distracted listening is the most unfulfilling and foreign mode for me. I recommend the opposite.
So, have these critics sampled even several hundred of the several thousand new jazz records that have come out this year? Have they devoted ca. 5 hours of calm listening time to each? That's getting into the thousands of hours already, an average of 3-4 hours every single day of the year, and you figure at some point for work or play they will want to listen to something from last year or earlier as well. I doubt that all of these numbers are nearly this high, though one or two of them might be (just a hunch, but I suspect it's the total number of records that's high and the number of spins that's low). I think lists which are constructed with authority are entertaining and sometimes even highly informative, but I have to be suspicious of the year-enders. Even if the critics themselves are authorities, the task they've chosen is one which under present conditions simply cannot be achieved authoritatively.
Classical music is, of course, a different and much more difficult situation. Maybe I really am living in the dark, but I've long been struck by the differences between how jazz and classical musicians go about their business. I think classical music badly needs an "underground" scene. I think classically trained players need to stop taking as a given that it's only a matter of time before they land a $200,000 a year gig playing in a top 5 orchestra. I think they then need to be willing to get to work building something better without the promise of an immediate union scale paycheck. String quartets playing Metallica covers in a classical style for coffee shop yuppies is not "underground." Jazz, its precarious condition notwithstanding, still has an underground. There are still compelling jazz performances and records being made in places and by people that the NEA and the yuppie DINKs they survey can't wrap their heads around. Can you say that about classical music? I can't. I see the same slick coating as the jazz world without the underground bearings that have kept it alive in contravention of so many professional listmakers' dire predictions. And I see a clear and simple explanation for this in the petit bourgeois self-importance of so many classical musicians. Jazz players collectively are not perfect, they are not saints, and of course they are getting more bourgeois by the day and will surely have to face this issue soon enough, but right this minute, their tradition is alive because they go underground and eat ramen when they have to. Meanwhile, the classical brats are floating higher and away, sipping merlot in a hot air balloon that's on fire. So I applaud the jazz critics' for including in their year-end lists music that was actually created this year! That means someone thought to make it, found a way to realize it, and got it into their hands. We should try it, classical folk. Grab your flannel shirts and PBR and let's get the fuck down to business already.
Musicians are prone to wondering these things when it comes to questions of critical authority, but I wonder also out of a bit of insecurity. I haven't acquired or listened to a single record that was released this calendar year. It's quite rare for me to do so any given year, and has been forever. Real or imagined professional obligation as a player, composer, teacher and thinker has compelled me to spend an awful lot of time catching up on things that happened before I was born, and only secondarily on staying "up to date" with the latest developments. Whether I'm winning the battle or not, this is slowly changing: I've acquired many more records released in the 2000's over the last couple of years than I did during the years they were actually released. There's plenty going on today that interests me; it's just so hard to find that it's easier to wait a while and see what people are still talking about at the end of next year. I've learned the hard way that it's safe, nay, essential to ignore flavors of the month during the month in question. That goes for the final month of the year as much as any other.
As for the authority question, I can't imagine putting out a list of my own even if I had done more work. I've found that I need 3 listens to settle on a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down. My opinion changes frequently before that point and almost never beyond it. But to rate a group of albums empirically against each other would require several more hearings of each. And of course, I'm not talking about listening in the car or while making dinner; the music needs to be the sole object of your attention if you're going to claim any authority whatsoever, even to yourself. (When I say "empirically," of course I don't mean "for everyone for all time," but I think that within your own aesthetic, you can certainly be clinical in going about this kind of thing. If you don't, you end up fooled.) This is not at all to say that you are not listening for pleasure or that you are otherwise contriving some foreign mode of perception; indeed, distracted listening is the most unfulfilling and foreign mode for me. I recommend the opposite.
So, have these critics sampled even several hundred of the several thousand new jazz records that have come out this year? Have they devoted ca. 5 hours of calm listening time to each? That's getting into the thousands of hours already, an average of 3-4 hours every single day of the year, and you figure at some point for work or play they will want to listen to something from last year or earlier as well. I doubt that all of these numbers are nearly this high, though one or two of them might be (just a hunch, but I suspect it's the total number of records that's high and the number of spins that's low). I think lists which are constructed with authority are entertaining and sometimes even highly informative, but I have to be suspicious of the year-enders. Even if the critics themselves are authorities, the task they've chosen is one which under present conditions simply cannot be achieved authoritatively.
Classical music is, of course, a different and much more difficult situation. Maybe I really am living in the dark, but I've long been struck by the differences between how jazz and classical musicians go about their business. I think classical music badly needs an "underground" scene. I think classically trained players need to stop taking as a given that it's only a matter of time before they land a $200,000 a year gig playing in a top 5 orchestra. I think they then need to be willing to get to work building something better without the promise of an immediate union scale paycheck. String quartets playing Metallica covers in a classical style for coffee shop yuppies is not "underground." Jazz, its precarious condition notwithstanding, still has an underground. There are still compelling jazz performances and records being made in places and by people that the NEA and the yuppie DINKs they survey can't wrap their heads around. Can you say that about classical music? I can't. I see the same slick coating as the jazz world without the underground bearings that have kept it alive in contravention of so many professional listmakers' dire predictions. And I see a clear and simple explanation for this in the petit bourgeois self-importance of so many classical musicians. Jazz players collectively are not perfect, they are not saints, and of course they are getting more bourgeois by the day and will surely have to face this issue soon enough, but right this minute, their tradition is alive because they go underground and eat ramen when they have to. Meanwhile, the classical brats are floating higher and away, sipping merlot in a hot air balloon that's on fire. So I applaud the jazz critics' for including in their year-end lists music that was actually created this year! That means someone thought to make it, found a way to realize it, and got it into their hands. We should try it, classical folk. Grab your flannel shirts and PBR and let's get the fuck down to business already.
30 December 2011
Who Are You and What Are You Doing In My Bookmarks?
Hmm...what other blogger-like behaviors can I feign for the next 24 hours in order to make it to the end of this project? Well, how about a little Link 'n' Run?
For reasons I seem to have forgotten, these blogs found their way into my bookmarks at some point in the past. Checking them out months (possibly years?) later, I'm impressed enough to recommend them here, which I normally don't do. Long live Blog Month...
•TeledyN
An interesting read with a range of interests and rate of activity which seem to match my own quite closely.
•Schoenberg
In particular, see this post for a fascinating story with a surprise ending. If you find this inspiring, I want to be your friend. If not, you can't be my friend anymore.
•Big Mouths
Go here for an epic and thought provoking missive "about composers and history, about how the past is ineluctably linked to the instantiation of the future, an instantiation we generally call the present." Now this is blogging!
•Alphabet Soup
Some timely reflections on the new music scene. And if for some reason you can't get enough of me from my own blog, I've spilled my guts here about an experience I had entering a competition.
It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack)
(Actually, I've been on to this one for a while, but I want to mention it anyway).
Stanley Jason Zappa "attacks" (in a good way) the only Adorno essay I thought I understood with sharp wit, contemporary perspective, and LOTS of highlighting. "Corporate Boppers and Performance Art Poseurs?" I am in all likelihood the only CalArts student who thinks that's funny (hilarious, actually).
For reasons I seem to have forgotten, these blogs found their way into my bookmarks at some point in the past. Checking them out months (possibly years?) later, I'm impressed enough to recommend them here, which I normally don't do. Long live Blog Month...
•TeledyN
An interesting read with a range of interests and rate of activity which seem to match my own quite closely.
•Schoenberg
In particular, see this post for a fascinating story with a surprise ending. If you find this inspiring, I want to be your friend. If not, you can't be my friend anymore.
•Big Mouths
Go here for an epic and thought provoking missive "about composers and history, about how the past is ineluctably linked to the instantiation of the future, an instantiation we generally call the present." Now this is blogging!
•Alphabet Soup
Some timely reflections on the new music scene. And if for some reason you can't get enough of me from my own blog, I've spilled my guts here about an experience I had entering a competition.
It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack)
(Actually, I've been on to this one for a while, but I want to mention it anyway).
Stanley Jason Zappa "attacks" (in a good way) the only Adorno essay I thought I understood with sharp wit, contemporary perspective, and LOTS of highlighting. "Corporate Boppers and Performance Art Poseurs?" I am in all likelihood the only CalArts student who thinks that's funny (hilarious, actually).
29 December 2011
Blogkeeping
For the first time in a while, I've done some tweaking around here:
•The toolbar has been adjusted to match the color scheme as well as possible within the absurdly limited range of possibilities provided by the template.
•The title of the blog has been shortened from "My Fickle Ears Dig It" to simply "Fickle Ears," and the information immediately below has gone from alliterative to merely authorial. Let's face it, we're all sick and tired of the standard issue blogospheric shtick, and no one more than me, a point I continue to belabor here. Even so, it is surprisingly difficult to avoid slipping back into common-practice blogging, so in a fleeting lucid moment, I've opted to up the austerity factor yet another notch. If anyone was genuinely curious about the original title, it's something I blurted out once in a band rehearsal after the first complete run-through of a difficult new tune I'd brought in. As with most such statements, we thought it much funnier at the time than it really is, and it only took me five years to realize that the shortened version is a better title for a blog.
•Similarly, I'm now strictly an anonymous "follower" of the few blogs to which I've subscribed through Blogger's built-in reader. I quit Facebook in a moment of clarity and pretty soon I've started creating another social network without even noticing? What the fuck? I prefer to follow blogs through good old-fashioned browser bookmarks which I capture while reading comment threads and clicking on the profiles of contributors who seem to have something timely to add to the conversation. I'll still be keeping my Blogger subscriptions simply for old time's sake as I can't imagine a drawback to doing so anonymously, though I'm sure to think of one soon. Anyway, if you are one of those authors and just saw me disappear from your followers list, (a) get a life, and (b) I promise I'm still reading you, even though you don't have a life.
•I've just discovered (probably years late as usual) that Blogger has a built-in stats page. As the kids say, LOL!!! I can't seem to get it to stop counting my own activity towards page views and the like, even though there's an option to disable this, so who knows about some of the numbers. The most perplexing? Supposedly, 81% of my pageviews (One word? Further LOL...) are on Windows and only 14% on Mac. I find that pretty hard to believe. Spambots?...REPUBLICANS?
•The toolbar has been adjusted to match the color scheme as well as possible within the absurdly limited range of possibilities provided by the template.
•The title of the blog has been shortened from "My Fickle Ears Dig It" to simply "Fickle Ears," and the information immediately below has gone from alliterative to merely authorial. Let's face it, we're all sick and tired of the standard issue blogospheric shtick, and no one more than me, a point I continue to belabor here. Even so, it is surprisingly difficult to avoid slipping back into common-practice blogging, so in a fleeting lucid moment, I've opted to up the austerity factor yet another notch. If anyone was genuinely curious about the original title, it's something I blurted out once in a band rehearsal after the first complete run-through of a difficult new tune I'd brought in. As with most such statements, we thought it much funnier at the time than it really is, and it only took me five years to realize that the shortened version is a better title for a blog.
•Similarly, I'm now strictly an anonymous "follower" of the few blogs to which I've subscribed through Blogger's built-in reader. I quit Facebook in a moment of clarity and pretty soon I've started creating another social network without even noticing? What the fuck? I prefer to follow blogs through good old-fashioned browser bookmarks which I capture while reading comment threads and clicking on the profiles of contributors who seem to have something timely to add to the conversation. I'll still be keeping my Blogger subscriptions simply for old time's sake as I can't imagine a drawback to doing so anonymously, though I'm sure to think of one soon. Anyway, if you are one of those authors and just saw me disappear from your followers list, (a) get a life, and (b) I promise I'm still reading you, even though you don't have a life.
•I've just discovered (probably years late as usual) that Blogger has a built-in stats page. As the kids say, LOL!!! I can't seem to get it to stop counting my own activity towards page views and the like, even though there's an option to disable this, so who knows about some of the numbers. The most perplexing? Supposedly, 81% of my pageviews (One word? Further LOL...) are on Windows and only 14% on Mac. I find that pretty hard to believe. Spambots?...REPUBLICANS?
Walling
I continue to meet classically-trained brass players who also play cooler music on cooler instruments quite well, but who have built a wall between the two endeavors. None of them are happy about it. What gives, y'all? You've done all the hard work! Crossing over should be easy.
I was a brass specialist by 8th grade and a tuba specialist by 11th. I kick myself harder and harder over it as the years go on and my piano chops remain flaccid. Yet this also meant that I had no choice but to pursue the music I was interested in on the only instrument I was able to play well enough to do so. And of course, it was never in question whether the tuba and I were right for each other, even if other pairings could conceivably have worked out just as well. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that strings were not in the cards, though. I don't know how anybody plays those cursed things.)
In any case, I suspect our pedagogy is at fault. Brass playing in every style needs to become an art again (if it ever was before) rather than a craft. When it does, we will own our complete musical personalities on any instrument on which we have attained sufficient technique to do so. Walling will be a thing of the past.
I was a brass specialist by 8th grade and a tuba specialist by 11th. I kick myself harder and harder over it as the years go on and my piano chops remain flaccid. Yet this also meant that I had no choice but to pursue the music I was interested in on the only instrument I was able to play well enough to do so. And of course, it was never in question whether the tuba and I were right for each other, even if other pairings could conceivably have worked out just as well. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that strings were not in the cards, though. I don't know how anybody plays those cursed things.)
In any case, I suspect our pedagogy is at fault. Brass playing in every style needs to become an art again (if it ever was before) rather than a craft. When it does, we will own our complete musical personalities on any instrument on which we have attained sufficient technique to do so. Walling will be a thing of the past.
The Transient Repertoire
I've forgotten where exactly, but somewhere or other among all the blogtastic drivel I've consumed over the past couple of weeks was an archetypal lament of the lack of recent compositions by living jazz artists which have truly entered the repertoire. It is indeed unfortunate in a sense, and yet at the same time, one wonders if this is simply a paradox inherent in the jazz tradition itself. Jazz is creative music, and as such, most everyone who plays it also composes for themselves (and rarely, if ever, for others; that's another interesting discussion). Performer-Composer is much more than a "traditional" mold towards which most musicians gravitate; it is essentially demanded of you by all kinds of circumstances inherent to this tradition. The inhibition of repertory momentum is built-in, paradoxically, by this emphasis on multi-faceted creativity.
You could say that there certainly is still a repertoire, and that it certainly has begun to ossify, but I can't help but wonder if this isn't the most incisive way to look at it. For one thing, the basic unit of currency in jazz repertoire has always been the particular performance, not just the lead sheet: Coltrane's and Hawkins' performances of "Body and Soul" are, of course, discrete items for today's players and listeners to tackle. In addition, within the most traditional circles, one could argue that the highly derivative nature of the compositions simply represents a different slant on repertoire, one by which the unit of currency is, again, a smaller one than the lead sheet: in other words, licks, chord progressions, and song forms. Perhaps this work doesn't so much enter the repertoire because it is the repertoire ground up and reconstituted with less new material added than might be expected in, say, the classical compositional tradition. By this logic, neo-traditionalism can be understood as a necessary "sausage-making" process that each generation (perhaps each musician) is tasked with, and as long as the "innovation" is happening concurrently somewhere else, this in and of itself cannot be a bad thing.
Having said all of that, I hereby nominate Buster Williams' "Christina" and Dave Holland's "The Balance" for repertory status. Damn it would be nice to be able to call either of those at a session...
You could say that there certainly is still a repertoire, and that it certainly has begun to ossify, but I can't help but wonder if this isn't the most incisive way to look at it. For one thing, the basic unit of currency in jazz repertoire has always been the particular performance, not just the lead sheet: Coltrane's and Hawkins' performances of "Body and Soul" are, of course, discrete items for today's players and listeners to tackle. In addition, within the most traditional circles, one could argue that the highly derivative nature of the compositions simply represents a different slant on repertoire, one by which the unit of currency is, again, a smaller one than the lead sheet: in other words, licks, chord progressions, and song forms. Perhaps this work doesn't so much enter the repertoire because it is the repertoire ground up and reconstituted with less new material added than might be expected in, say, the classical compositional tradition. By this logic, neo-traditionalism can be understood as a necessary "sausage-making" process that each generation (perhaps each musician) is tasked with, and as long as the "innovation" is happening concurrently somewhere else, this in and of itself cannot be a bad thing.
Having said all of that, I hereby nominate Buster Williams' "Christina" and Dave Holland's "The Balance" for repertory status. Damn it would be nice to be able to call either of those at a session...
28 December 2011
A Further Appeal To Time-Honored Literary Devices (i.e. MAD LIBS!!!)
• • • • •
An Open Letter To My Dissenters On Why Classical Isn’t Cool Anymore
Stefan Andrew Lord Kac, with apologies to Nicholas "The Cherub" Payton
(and previously, if briefly, Professor Gann)
Let me make one thing clear. I am not dissing an art form. I am dissing the name, Classical. Just like being called Cracker affected how White people felt about themselves at one time, I believe the term "CLASSICAL" affects the style of playing. I am not a Cracker and I am not a Classical musician.
What do Claude Debussy, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Kyle Gann (LOL!!!) and myself share in common? A disdain for Classical. I am reintroducing a talk to the table of a conversation that my ancestors wanted to have a long time ago. It is on their shoulders that I stand.
"Classical" is an oppressive colonialist slave-owner term and I want no parts of it. If Classical wasn’t a slave, why did Cage try to free it? Classical is not music, it is an idea that hasn’t served any of us well. It saddens me most that some of my friends can’t see that. Some of y’all who know me and I’ve even employed, stood on the bandstand with, know how important tradition is to me. My work speaks to that.
This Is Most Decidedly Not Any Kind of Rant
For all those who say I’m on a crazed, cranky, angry, dark rant. There is nothing crazed, cranky, angry or dark about what I write, but a lot of this hate energy I’ve received online truly is. Someone has even gone as far as to deem me the Nicholas Payton of Classical?
You know what the most offensive part of that statement is to me?
The “CLASSICAL” part.
I’m trying to save this music and folks are straight lambasting me. The saving grace is, for the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly favorable and it’s here where I choose to focus my gaze. I’m sacrificing myself for the greater good of post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music and some of you are calling me names, and I’m the angry one?
Most of these folks don’t even know me, but yet they have a strong dislike for Stefan Andrew Lord Kac. I am a human being, not some internet bot. When you hold an intense dislike for someone you don’t know, it means that somewhere down deep inside, you have an intense dislike for yourself.
Please take at look at yourselves. What are you doing to save this music? Are you out there earning meaningless masters degrees from fancy-pants art schools and enjoying the California sunshine in December honing your skills for the next trumpet player to take you for a fool on the basketball court, or are you just functioning under the guise of what you have been fed for many years and are told is the way things have to be?
You can dislike me or what I say all you want, but it doesn’t stop what I said from being true. It only disturbs you this deeply because it dismantles everything you’ve built your life upon. As I've stated on my blog, “CLASSICAL” is resistant to change. It wants to hold on to the old way of doing things, even if they’ve proven to not work.
What are you so afraid of? That you actually might have to think for yourself? That you will be responsible for the information that has been passed down from generation to generation though the lineage? That you have to live up to the great legacy this music demands?
I challenge my dissenters to really be an individual and stand alone in the face of everyone telling you that you’re wrong, crazy and can’t do it. That’s what Schoenberg did. That’s what Cage did. Are you willing? Are you able? Are you ready? Only a few can really do it and my blog makes that clear. It ain’t for everybody. So, go on, continue to box yourself in a label that was designed to marginalize White musicians and cut them off from their brilliance.
pBAAJMM!
When post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music became “CLASSICAL”, it separated itself from the European folk music idiom. I’m just trying to take it back to its roots. European folk music has been separated from its root (what you call Classical) and, as a result, all of the branches of the tree are dying. White music is dying and I’m trying to help save it. Turn on the radio, if you don’t believe me. How many Classical records that have come out in the last 5 years that you’ve really loved?
I do as much to support this music as most of you. I don’t just come online and bitch about the state about this music. I spew real and actual vitriol at the art and its artists and here I have to see some of you tear me down and say I’m killing the blogosphere? When it is some of you who want to hold on to an oppressive idea that doesn’t serve post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music who are the true murderers.
The music was just fine before it was called Classical and will be just fine without the name.
There is nothing to be afraid of except yourselves.
I am Stefan Andrew Lord Kac and I play post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music.
Nicholas Payton plays more horn than I do, but mine is BIGGER!
pBAAJMM!
(the giant on whose shoulders I stand)
27 December 2011
An aside in the form of comic relief
Thanks to Christmas, I'm now the proud owner of one of these:
Look out Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.
Look out Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.
26 December 2011
Occupation of the Mind, Part 2
• • • • •
NP continues:
The 99% is simply about a class of Whites aligning themselves with the impoverished they didn’t give a shit about until they, too, were broke. Am I supposed to care now that you’ve had a “come to Jesus” moment and want to say it’s all about us? Us didn’t become “us” until a faction of people felt the burn who never felt it. They didn’t give a shit when it was “just us”, so now I don’t give a shit. Justice. How does that song go, “Cry Me A River”?
At the heart of this statement lies what white culture might call an "old world" view of ancestry and cultural inheritance. In other words, you are a living representative of your entire lineage whether you like it or not, and their deeds and misdeeds alike are yours as well. I'm not oblivious to the backstory here, and yet I also have trouble seeing this worldview resulting in anything less than a permanent impasse in the getting along department. Because I'll never meet a German who helped exterminate the Jewish side of my family, I can't see any reason to put all of that on any given German indiscriminately until one who had nothing to do with it can be cowed into a contrite gesture of my choosing. From my middle-class white American vantage point, there's no rational justification for this, nor can I anticipate anything constructive coming of it. And to meet a random, unexpected contrite gesture with "so now I don't give a shit" would simply be to throw salt in the wounds.
So yes, Mr. Payton, we presently feel the burn, and only more acutely with your comments. In jazz as in life, the options are few for us modern-day pale folk who aspire to be part of the solution: apathy is complicity, activism is sour grapes; we are thieves if we imitate black music too closely, or ingrates if we do not imitate it closely enough; and the happy medium in both cases is a pinball of a moving target. It is a worldview by which culpability and victimry alike become genetic traits, and where each generation takes with them to the grave their children's hope for reconciliation along with their own. I think we can do better without forgetting our history, and I'm ready when you are.
25 December 2011
Occupation of the Mind, Part 1
• • • • •
Here's NP waxing resentful on the Occupy movement.
The "Carpetbagger" item is intriguing. I think might know some, actually. Unfortunately, they do not just make pilgrimages to New Orleans, but indeed bring their "discoveries" home with them and try to claim some sort of direct line. The music is often embarrassing and the gesture borders on the offensive. So I'm with you there, NP. Some soul-searching and ton more time in the woodshed would do these busybodies good.
Now...
"Why are people occupying the streets when the only person capable of keeping you from your dreams is you? The Occupy movement is a distraction and will not yield anything but more confusion. There is no “machine” to fight against. We are in the dark because people are asleep to their own light. Cure the internal war within and the war without instantly vanishes.
We’ve worked from the outside in for centuries and still have not completely resolved the bigger issues. Grand gestures make great headlines, but the real healing takes place on an individual level.
"The internal war," huh? Sounds about right. We all have one, and we should absolutely fight it in the way that you describe. Is that it, though? Collective action is dead? Really? Since the 1960's? I'd like to believe you. I'm an introvert. I'm good at fighting internal battles and virtually incapable of being part of a collective anything. But comfort be damned, I can't agree with you on this, and I would, with all due respect, raise the question of Abolitionism first and foremost. How would that have gone without a little bit of collective action, public debate and well-timed violence thrown in? Not a direct analogy? I'm not so sure. The Pro-Slavery side certainly took great pains to specifically inhibit the formation of collective consciousness and action alike among their slaves. They feared it, and they were right to. They were cowards and they were outnumbered. Even failing any more specific similarities, I think the same can absolutely be said about modern-day Wall Street. Tell me why I'm wrong.
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