Fickle Ears

Blog Month IV: Perfunctory Terminal Posting

2011-12-31T20:16:00.000-08:00

Meh.

The content-rich life is not for me. I do make it look good, though.

Survey: Should This Blog Be Hosted Elsewhere?

2011-12-31T14:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Flavor of the (Final) Month

2011-12-31T14:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Who Are You and What Are You Doing In My Bookmarks?

2011-12-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

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).

Blogkeeping

2011-12-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

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?

Walling

2011-12-29T00:29:00.000-08:00

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.

The Transient Repertoire

2011-12-29T00:18:00.000-08:00

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...

A Further Appeal To Time-Honored Literary Devices (i.e. MAD LIBS!!!)

2011-12-28T13:29:00.000-08:00

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •

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)

An aside in the form of comic relief

2011-12-27T12:26:00.003-08:00

Thanks to Christmas, I'm now the proud owner of one of these:

Look out Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.

Occupation of the Mind, Part 2

2011-12-26T12:43:00.002-08:00

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •

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.

Occupation of the Mind, Part 1

2011-12-25T12:03:00.006-08:00

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •

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.

2011-12-24T00:25:00.004-08:00

Poonpuff FAQ for the e-Nihilists in the room (as well as any and all past/present/future MFEDI readers whose e-worldview necessitates such overt clarifications of purpose and method be made again and again regarding this and the few other constructive, well-written weblogs about music and musicians)

WHEEEEW, okay...

ahem...

Dear Angry Reader With Better Things To Do Than Sit Around Reading Some Young White Asshole's Weblog,

Before attacking my motives for joining the Post-Nicholas Payton Foofaraw (PNPF or "Poonpuff"), for making any particular argument therein, and/or for having this blog in the first place, I would humbly ask you to consider the following clarifications of purpose and method, issued at the outset of my joining the PNPF and applicable to all subsequent statements made on this topic.

(1) You're not qualified to disagree with someone who "plays more horn" than you do. Who do you think you are, anyway?

While NP indeed plays more horn than I do, mine is bigger.

In all seriousness, I graciously defer to NP and similarly accomplished individuals (if any others exist) on matters which are directly informed by one's degree of musical skill and/or career success, such as issues of instrumental technique, music criticism, marketing/career advice, practice habits, etc. However, any generalizations (music-related or otherwise) about a group of which I am a member (e.g. "white people" or "all these kids with music degrees") are fair game for rebuttal because they require no further qualifications than (a) that I be a member of the group(s) in question, and (b) that I tell the truth about myself. Under those circumstances, no musical skill whatsoever is required to be qualified to make such a rebuttal, even to a highly skilled musician such as NP. Were I to make a blanket generalization about "black people" or "New Orleans cats," don't you think NP and all other members of those respective groups would be qualified to rebut my statement?

(2) But...you're...white. WTF is up with that shit?

Guilty. Can't change it, and unlike many white classmates growing up, I never tried. If it's relevant (and I'm not saying it is; only you can decide), I did go to an elementary school from 1st through 5th grade where blacks outnumbered whites by more than 2-to-1; I have spent hundreds of hours of my life on the basketball court (one of NP's hallowed proving grounds, which is the only reason I bring it up) outnumbered by a similar margin; I did continue to volunteer (albeit in fits and starts) on the Northside of Minneapolis long after I finished high school there; believe it or not, a good high school friend of mine declared another friend and I "blacker than some [black people]" even though we didn't talk, act or dress like him; and of course, it goes without saying that a good number of my strongest musical influences are African-Americans. These are mere facts about my life experience. They do not grant me any kind of authority to speak about racial issues that I would not otherwise be thought to have. By relating them here, I simply hope to convince anyone who is not otherwise inclined to believe so that I care and that black people are real and human to me. You don't have to believe me, but that is the truth. That's all I've got for you on that front.

Hence, if you see fit to comment on something I wrote (which I welcome), I would appreciate the common intellectual courtesy of having this articulated in terms of the content of the argument in question, not in terms of my supposed qualifications (or lack thereof) to make it based on overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member (e.g. "young white assholes" or "academically trained white musicians from the Upper Midwest who, surprisingly, can also hold their own on the basketball court") when these generalizations may or may not actually be reflected in my specific case, and indeed, when you clearly have no possible way of knowing if they are reflected in my case or not based solely on an argument I have put forward about music and the world immediately surrounding it. There certainly are "qualifications" I do not and cannot possess, and I promise never to speak as if I possess them; I am, however, eminently qualified to evaluate overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member, no matter who made them or what they are. At that point, any further psychoanalysis of my identity, while perhaps relevant to other, broader discussions, is moot to the particular argument I've made about music and the world immediately surrounding it. And that's why we're all here. Just the facts, ma'am.

(3) Gee, that's a mouthful, Socrates. If you're a musician, why don't you go practice/study/listen/compose instead of writing a pointless blog about your white angst?

Like you, I'm darn close to being a Nihilist at this point, but not completely. The ethical issues surrounding music still matter enough to me to devote a small bit of my time to considering them publicly. This is wholly a matter of (a) self-interest (i.e. since I have to live and work in this world just like NP and everyone else who makes music, and therefore would like to see it improved wherever possible), and (b) the sense that such "improvements" are, frequently, so fucking obvious to a majority of us and thus quite easily attainable if only more of us were to give them proper consideration using adequately precise terminology and more than 140 characters where needed. As you no doubt know based on your wording of the above question, most blogs fall short of meeting this need; this is where I come in.

If I had no self-interest in seeing a better musical world, or if I thought it was a wholly untenable proposition, then no, I absolutely would not bother. There are other areas of life that I feel are lost causes in this way (see: Congress, U.S.), but music is not one of them. I believe that music is trivial in comparison to these other areas, and therefore that it is easier to fix. Only a small percentage of these musical issues do I choose to explore publicly. The rest I keep to myself and seldom write down; thus, the content here is already heavily edited and pared down to its essence. You are absolutely entitled to judge it to be a waste of your time, but not a waste of my own; the latter is for myself alone to judge. Know that I spend quite a bit of time reading blogs as well as writing them, and have thus developed a very low tolerance for vacuous garbage masquerading as musicology. My activities here are always directed towards achieving something more vital and useful. Even during my annual "Blog Month" project (which is presently in effect), during which I force myself to blog daily for a month regardless of whether I feel I have something just this important to say, I am after two things I believe to be constructive objectives: one is to throw myself a change-up, knowing that I sometimes become a different writer when forced to work constantly; and the other is to critique the vacuous garbage referred to above through the time-honored literary device of satire.

Sounds like fun, huh? None of this is a burden on my direct music-making endeavors, from which I, like virtually every other musician, need occasional respite anyway. In fact, blogging has frequently allowed me to bring fresh motivation to these endeavors at times when it has been lacking. (Knowing that more people would take your blog seriously if you "played more horn," while not necessarily right, certainly provides some motivation, doesn't it?) It isn't hard to find bloggers and trolls whose musical lives are out of balance in this way, but I do not consider myself to be one of them. If you do consider me to be one, I would like to know on what intimate knowledge of my inner thoughts you base this observation, and also what you are doing wasting your time with my senseless rants? It must be more complicated than misery loving company...

a foofaraw over a kerfuffle about a boondoggle

2011-12-23T14:41:00.004-08:00

Longtime MFEDI readers know the drill by this time: I post misinformed rants about pop music while the real issues are discussed elsewhere by more important people on their more important blogs, are then commented on extensively by the people I malign here, and are noted by me, if at all, only weeks, months or years later after I've had a chance to catch up on the gory details, by which time comment threads have been closed, libel suits filed, and any further attempt to get a word in edgewise merely dismissed as self-important "intellectual land prospecting." Ah yes, long live the blogosphere, the first (and I hope last) vehicle of human discourse where it is neither what you said nor how you said it that matter, but rather when!

So it is, again, with the Nic Payton skirmish, and here I am late to the party as usual, still young, white, middle class and accredited, just like I was before, still with a blog and a project of my own invention whereby I intend to post on it daily for a month, and presented with yet another eminent black musician who I have great respect for saying a few things I agree with alongside many more things that make me want to quit playing music altogether and go back to working at the airport. You could argue that the worst thing I could do under these circumstances would be to get involved; indeed, there superficially seems to be nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. By dint of both a deeper interpretation of the possibilities and a spectacular lack of willpower, I hereby declare my intent (to be withdrawn whenever I see fit) to enter the fray. In part by choice but also by necessity on some levels, this will take place here rather than elsewhere until further notice. The next post will explain in more detail why I feel justified in doing this, and will be linked to at the top of each subsequent post on the topic in order to anticipate the usual nihilistic barbs.

(FYI, Payton's blog is here. Further links omitted; you're smart enough to follow the trail.)

Also, closed-circuit to Sean Roderick: where's Sean Roderick when you need him? If you're out there reading, I want your reaction (on or off the record) as this discussion unfolds.

Knowledge as a function of volition

2011-12-22T23:03:00.004-08:00

"create your own systems based on what you know"

So reads one of the myriad scrawlings on the inside of a practice room door here at The Herb Alpert School of Music at The California Institute of the Arts. Current and recent CalArtians will surely know the door in question, and probably laugh heartily at me for sweating it enough to warrant a blog entry, even during a Blog Month. Not to be deterred, I forge ahead with my critique anyway. Vandalism and postings are policed rather closely here, no doubt due to things getting out of hand at some point in the recent past (not hard to imagine), but for whatever reason, this door lives a charmed life, perhaps an amnesty gesture of sorts by The Institute towards the many mystically-inclined poor spellers which inhabit it each weekday in search of enlightenment through four-part chorales and species counterpoint. Whatever the reason, the door boasts an ever growing collection of poorly delivered bathroom humor, notably more skillfully executed drawings (this is, after all, an art school) and the occasional attempt at a deep thought, attempts which seldom fail to betray at least a hint of the resentment which inspired them.

I seldom use this room, but each time I do, I'm reminded of the above line, and it bothers me more each time. It was one of the first I noticed, my eyes drawn inexplicably to it from the start despite its relatively plain and small appearance among other monstrosities. At first, I located the crux of my discomfort in the word "systems," being as I am utterly unmoved by most Systems Music, as well as highly suspicious of (if not occasionally fascinated by) serial procedures. In the broader sense, though, it's a more harmless word: almost anything could be a system, including my own open instrumentation templates and letter-and-number based cataloguing (not titling) of works. As time has gone on, I've realized that it is the second half of the statement which is truly dangerous: "...based on what you know."

This is, for one thing, superfluous, and for another, potentially stifling as well. Given the broadest possible meaning of "systems," any you create will inevitably be "based on what you know." (as opposed to...what you don't know?) More importantly, though, "what you know" is not a fixed, bounded concept! You have the ability not only to purposefully choose to expand your knowledge, but to use that which you already possess to guide this search in a way that best serves your objectives. Conversely, I can't help but read this statement as implying causality; in other words, that the time to create your own systems is when you're just sick and tired of learning new stuff, or likewise, that the time to stop learning new stuff is when you decide you want to create your own systems. This reeks of the militant ignorance of pop culture, where "The Beatles didn't read music, so why should I?"* or "Music lessons are for people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves." Think about it: by the time you are playing in a band, even if you've never had formal study, you've learned something somewhere along the way; by implication then, to claim that you have arrived at that perfect amount of knowledge whereby what you have so far is enough but any more would divest you of your individuality and ruin your work is an awfully big leap. I mean really, how unlikely is it that this very day, right that fucking moment when someone asked you the question, that was the moment when you found the magical balance between thinking and feeling that almost no artist in history has ever found? Come the fuck on people.

~~create~~ evolve your own systems based on ~~what you know~~ your evolving experience

Maybe? I don't know. Now it's contrived, but you get my point. It takes more than a door out of view of the authorities and a flash of hatred for virtuosi to tackle this kind of thing. For now, I'm choosing to leave my mark on the blogosphere rather than on the back of a practice room door.

*Is this really true about The Beatles? I'd been led to believe otherwise, but I don't know for sure. BTW, I'm paraphrasing the quote but not fabricating the sentiment; someone (who shall remain nameless) actually expressed this to me once.

The Blogosphere, Post-Big-Bang

2011-12-21T18:46:00.003-08:00

It has been a full year since I conducted a proper blogospheric round-up, which consists of allocating a couple of weeks worth of my "spare" time to trudging through my bookmarks (yes, I still do it that way for the most part) until I either get sick of it or I reach the shitlist at the bottom (i.e. blogs that have gone dormant or that I've otherwise determined are not worth my time, most typically because they suckered me in with one erudite post about Stravinsky's serial music but turn out to be more often concerned with pets and progeny). Feeds are just further oppressive tools of common practice blogging, whereby the latest is by default the greatest; bookmarks, meanwhile, are sortable and anonymous, which I like. So anyway, I've not been all the way through them in quite a while, and having now gotten a good head start, I'm tempted to conclude (non-empirically so far) that the blogosphere, like the universe, appears to be contracting. I'm sure that the sheer number of extant blogs continues to grow, but the activity on them seems to be slowing down in general (including, I should admit, here as well). Is it possible we are getting closer to my wet dream of a blogosphere where no one posts unless they have something really earth-shattering and well-constructed to say? Not really. I do sense that some fat has been trimmed, but it's not a proportionate amount to the overall decline in production. (Plus, holding Blog Month even just once a year pretty much upsets this particular apple cart, doesn't it?) If the fad has passed, though, that's fine with me. It was overdue.

Winter Break Stuff

2011-12-20T22:59:00.005-08:00

I've long since abandoned learning tunes for the sake of learning tunes, but I still go out of my way two or three times a year to fill a hole in my knowledge of the standard jazz rep, as well as seeking out a few gnarly heads for their purely technical challenges. Whether in or out of school, this is often one of the only times of year when I can devote the time to see these processes through to completion, and so my mind almost habitually starts thinking that way.

This year's winter harvest? The standard "Darn That Dream" and Eric Dolphy's "Miss Ann" from the album Far Cry.

I live in/near LA now, there are jazzheads here, and this tune gets called. It's also a great tune that I should know by now. Like most tubists, I first heard it on Birth of the Cool, and for that reason its one of the few standards I come to with some of the lyrics burned into my memory. The hipness of the arrangement scared my teenage self away from trying to play it, though, and having already learned to thoroughly distrust the Real Book, I didn't take that chart seriously at the time. (Checking now, it's actually pretty close, but like almost every tune in the Real Book, there's one gratuitous, inexplicable slash chord in an odd place. Really, what would life be without all the gratuitous, inexplicable slash chords in the Real Book where plain old diatonic seventh chords would have sufficed?) Oddly enough, the last several standards I've made a study of have all been most commonly played in G: East of the Sun, Out of Nowhere, and now Darn That Dream. Interestingly, the first three chords of the latter two tunes are identical (Gmaj-Bbmin-Eb7), though on different durational scales; how many standards in Bb or Eb do you know that tonicize a key that far in the "flat" direction that soon? Similarly, thinking of, say, Groovin' High in Eb moving to A- D7 in that position, how many tunes in G or D do this in "sharp" direction? An interesting question for composers and players alike. Maybe writing in C isn't so much of a cop-out after all; by this logic, at least, you would be giving yourself the best chance to avoid being subconsciously influenced by what a distant modulation might entail.

And now for something completely different:

I LOVE this head and have wanted to play it ever since I heard it. The bugaboo, of course, is the range: it spans the entirety of the textbook alto range, which in sheer quantity is not unreasonable for most other horns, but the particular pitch level at which it lies is highly problematic. For tubists, the only viable "front line" solution would be to play it sounding down one octave, yielding a range from C# below the bass clef staff to A above it. A further octave displacement poses a wholly different technical challenge, but it is doable, and this is actually the range in which I plan to spend the most time. Because of the demands of front line playing (my exclusive interest as a jazz player for a long time), I am a much better improvisor up high than down low. This is also complicated by fingerings: in the highest ranges on brass instruments, one seldom needs bother with positions beyond the first four because the overtones are so close together. In the low range, though, you need all of them, bringing far more uncomfortable valve/slide positions into play, which is often the primary challenge in executing a passage. When I began pursuing bass functions in earnest, this was a tough lesson to learn, and one which I am still struggling with: fingerings and valve technique had been the "easy" part of playing since I memorized my elementary fingering chart in seventh grade, but with five of those suckers needed to play chromatically between the first two harmonics (which is still the "money" range if you play Eb or F tuba), boppish heads get challenging in a hurry. I've made progress; this will be another step if I can do it. One thing I've learned is that it's likely that at least one of the other 11 transpositions between these two extremes will sound and feel better than either of them do, and also that at least one will be nearly impossible, for whatever reason. It's good to know where those are.

Agency

2011-12-19T15:10:00.004-08:00

As long as we're alive and expect to have a hand in it, why bother attempting to predict "The Future of Music?" Go make it what you want it to be.

first only next

2011-12-18T22:27:00.006-08:00

Just one x-mas music gig this year, earlier tonight with the youth symphony at a Korean Church in Northridge. In previous years, added to my other x-mas music commitments, this could have been torturous; in fact, with just one on the calendar this year (and some "real" music filling out the program), it was tolerable verging on fun.

Would you believe that I've had two paying orchestral gigs here already? My FIRST two paying orchestral gigs of any kind ever? After less than four months? Without knowing anyone? After never having had a single one back home? Not even with a pickup group or as a ringer with a youth orchestra? Are you kidding? This is mundane stuff, but its more use than I ever was to any orchestra in Minneapolis. Call me bitter for saying so, or laugh at me for bothering to make note of it here, but it's a fact and I just can't help but wonder. You'd think I would have stumbled into one single solitary gig back home at some point. Did I do too good a job of marketing myself as a jazz player? Is there just that little work back home? Is it nothing more than sheer coincidence? SoCal will surely humble me yet, but I'll be pondering all of this yet more intently if it continues.

An Unlikely Whiner Responds

2011-12-17T11:00:00.001-08:00

If I may be permitted to lift the moratorium on CalArts "issues" for just another day...

As of yesterday afternoon, an anonymous open letter-ish document obviously written by a student has been posted sparingly but consistently around the building chiding students (all of us, apparently) for three main transgressions: the "hipster thing," a lack of personal respect for one another, and excessive complaining about the state of the Institute.

Without quoting the letter verbatim, I'll say that the first two points resonated very much with me based on my experiences here over the past three and a half months. The third, however, rings quite hollow, and not because there is not a lot of visible complaining going on here. To call it "complaining" rather than "criticism" or "unrest" frames the issue negatively from the start, and not in a way that I feel is particularly accurate. While there is certainly some whining here, as there is at every school I've attended, most of my direct acquaintances are able to articulate their grievances (and they all have some) quite a bit more cogently than I've witnessed before, and I rarely disagree with them (also unusual). This, however, is incidental to the larger argument expressed in this section of the letter, namely that we should all just shut up and go along with however the Institute decides to do things, and that this is somehow the only way to conserve the legendary CalArts...thing, whatever it actually is (and if it still exists in the first place, which I'm not at all convinced that it does).

Pardon me for saying so, but unless I'm badly mistaken, the original CalArts...thing could not reasonably be said to have had such blind reverence for authority, could it? And surely if no one had thought to agitate (including "complaining," if you insist on calling it that) for something like CalArts, it would never have existed in the first place. Given all of that, I think it's incumbent upon all of us here to speak up when something isn't working, especially when we can all see an obvious solution. I would not want to attend a school nor live in a world where any such individual is written off as a mere "complainer" while administrators and bureaucrats run amok.

The question of my potential involvement in any sort of "movement" to improve CalArts has been on my mind for several weeks. I am very conflicted about it: my time at the U of MN essentially sapped me of all will to undertake such ventures, not to mention any faith that they could ever succeed in even the smallest way. I have already sat down face-to-face with a few administrators, written them letters, tasted their evasive answers, lived their poor decisions, watched the carousel turn, and marveled at the uniformity of thought and action from one to the next. I also realize that most if not all of the problems I am most concerned with here really are bigger than CalArts, and that fighting them on that level, even if it were effective, would be a waste of time in the grand geo-political and socio-economic scheme of things. So in a sense, I can't blame anyone for simply checking out and investing their time in their work (and/or some real community activism if they're so inclined). Even so, let's not quit our whining just yet. As bad as things ever look, I have to think they'd look a lot worse if we simply accepted them on blind faith.

Humor

2011-12-16T19:00:00.005-08:00

Whereas the place of humor in concert music is relatively secure, the types of humor appropriate to given musical demands and the degree, in both frequency and intensity, to which one might properly appeal to them in a musical work can still be contentious issues. For years in Minneapolis, I've frequently encountered a particular strain of humor among musicians which I find counterproductive and distasteful. Finding it in evidence here at CalArts in almost identical form, I'm compelled to attempt an analysis.

One most often encounters this type of humor in student work, but it is by no means limited to students, and occasionally ends up being consolidated into something even more stifling and insidious, if often subtle, in more mature work. I would label it Resentful Humor, or Humor as a Defense Mechanism. To be sure, it is sometimes hard to know whether one is observing a constructive criticism of someone or something, or simply a childish display of petty resentment and insecurity. It is by no means unusual, though, to know immediately, and among those clear-cut cases that I have witnessed, the majority have been of the latter type.

The telltale characteristics of this dynamic are not necessarily unique to it, and are seldom present all at once; hence, there is no airtight formula for determining its presence or absence. That being said, here are what I perceive to be its primary fingerprints:

(1) Humor is overused.
I am referring here not to the emotive intensity of the humor, but to its pervasiveness throughout the work, thereby comprising a substantially larger portion of the piece's content than any obvious structural or aesthetic necessity would seem to dictate.

(2) Humor is used purely to fill time.
In a sense, this is just one particular instance of (1), but its ubiquity earns it a category of its own. It is more or less specific to improvised settings, but is observable in all types of them (i.e. harmonic-structural, totally free, and everything in between). In structured settings, this is a way to "just get through" a final chorus; in freer contexts, it is typically the end result of a gradual devolvement of focus and intention, to the point where the player(s) don't know what to do, but, contra Miles, insist on doing something anyway. (Yes, those same dozen jazz-world anecdotes do get tiresome, but seriously, don't you think Miles hit this one more squarely on the head than maybe even he could have imagined? And if his own sense of humor was ever in question, is this not due as much to his restraint in appealing to it as to his infamously surly stage presence?)

(3) The aesthetic dimension of the work is wholly incidental to the gesture of mocking/deriding a particular piece, composer, band or musical style.
Here I am referring to something beyond (or perhaps falling short of) parody or satire, devices which I would take to entail a certain sophistication, and which can be directed at extramusical targets as well as musical ones. Conversely, I would define the particular dynamic in question here as unequivocally about music, and also unapologetically inelegant, often resorting, conceptually at least, to brute force in order to make a disproportionately simple point. And as with the previous items on this list, the void where any more specific musical intent or personal/spiritual necessity might normally exist is palpable.

(4) The work is "epic."
Obviously, this is the most subjective thing on this list, but I see it everywhere, and conveniently, there's a word for it that you might even hear it uttered before or after the concert. Don't quote me as I'm an avowed homebody with a phobia of pop culture, but it seems to me that events which occur outside the realm of idle leisure and/or affect people other than the utterer seldom qualify as "epic." This usage is, I suppose, a sarcastic gesture in and of itself, the reclamation of an ultra-serious-sounding word on behalf of all things inane, kind of like bad meaning good, but more complicated than that (and obviously incubated in a very different subculture). "Epic" is inherently conflicted in nature, complimentary on the surface while always a touch self-depricating-verging-on-resentful on its deeper levels. It is laughing both with and at oneself rolled in one gesture, perhaps ultimately unsure of which, if either, is more deserved. Not all music we might dub "epic" in post-concert small-talk is of the resentful type, but all of the resentful music I am attempting to describe could reasonably be labeled "epic" given the current (and no doubt temporary) meaning of this promiscuous piece of slang.

Having voiced my contempt for this resentful, "epic" music, I'll grant that if it is truly your music, then you should go make it. Study it, nurture it, and consolidate it until it reaches rapturous heights of bitterness and inelegance. If you have something important to say that can only be said by mocking the Count Basie rhythm section, then that's your work and you should go do it. If improvised music is a blank slate for us to explore who we really are and you thereby discover yourself to be a masturbating parakeet who can't stop laughing hysterically at itself, then more power to you. Resentment runs rampant in our musical culture, and you shouldn't let anyone else tell you whether or not yours is justified. As for the healthy bit of resentment I myself harbor towards much of the world, "epic" obstinate crudity strikes me as among the least constructive of the possible responses. Such works do nothing to remedy any petty misjudgments or outrageous injustices that might have inspired them; if anything, they gratify the perpetrators, who get to watch their victims writhe impotently with anger rather than channel it constructively into the kind of work that might someday do future generations the favor of exposing them.

Most Jazz (and discourse about it) Sucks

2011-12-15T10:30:00.010-08:00

An archetypal blogospheric kerfuffle has erupted over guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel's assertion that most jazz sucks. In the interest of sparing readers a linkfest, I'll simply tell you where I first read about it and assume that y'all are smart enough to follow the thread as far as you feel is worth your time. My comments follow below.

Does "most jazz suck?" The obvious explanations for the appearance of such a condition are no less relevant for being so obvious: there's more jazz now and more documentation of it, and we've never heard the mediocre players of the past because they've been forgotten. I will admit, though, that I've always felt jazz to be the most unforgiving kind of music I've been involved with. Anyone who sits through enough high school and college ensemble concerts comes to sense this over time. Perfunctory student performances of Holst and Grainger tend to be substantially more listenable than even relatively accomplished student renditions of any given Real Book tune. Most of the best student big bands I've heard tearing through some really hard arrangements don't have a single soloist who one could reasonably say is improvising on a level commensurate with their chops, and it usually is not close. In other words, jazz is not like sex, pizza and chocolate chip cookies, things which are said to be good even when they're bad. In fact, the opposite is true: good jazz can still be pretty bad, at least as I experience the world, which is why I agree with what Rosenwinkel said and don't see a hint of either hypocrisy or hyperbole in his doing so. I would freely grant that most of my performances and all of my records suck, that I'm in a near-constant state of personal crisis over this, and that I'm constantly seeking a way forward. I'll also say without hesitation that I frequently encounter self-important charlatans who are very comfortable with having achieved much less than I have, and I imagine that with KR being as accomplished as he is, those people are far more numerous in his life than in mine. It sounds to me like all he's asking for is humility and dedication; doesn't sound like much, but it is.

An aside on the use and value of blogging: by conventional wisdom, some of the highest-profile contributors to this brouhaha broke the cardinal rule of online conduct by writing things that they almost certainly would not have said to one another in person, or at least not verbatim. Anyone who's spent two seconds on the internet knows that it would indeed be a much kinder, gentler place if this rule was never broken, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that the way it emboldens people to let loose on each other is also one of its most useful features. Because of people's natural tendency to play nice in person, the potential for uproarious diatribes over issues like this really exists only online, ergo, insofar as these eruptions further the dialogue, the dehumanization of rhetorical opponents in each others' eyes could actually be seen as a valuable foil to polite set-break conversation, where little beyond mere diversion can be accomplished.

It may be duplicitous to shoot straight online while playing nice in person, but until each one of us truly becomes the straight-talking, tell-it-like-it-is, brutally honest person we all say we are, blog comment threads might remain the only way some of the most important issues get an honest treatment. Keep it about the topic at hand, but please don't keep it civil; we can always kiss each others' asses at the gig. And as is inevitably uttered once all hell has broken loose in one of these threads, shouldn't we all just go practice instead? Yes and no. Rosenwinkel's complaint about musicians not being all in enough of the time is just as relevant to our discourse as it is to our music-making. Paradoxically, the same faceless passive aggression which enables such great wastes of online time and energy may also be the most direct route to a more incisive dialogue than that which polite musical company typically permits.

Concert Trifecta/A Diatribe Deferred

2011-12-14T00:17:00.002-08:00

One more to plug, though there's no labyrinthine score to post this time: today at noon in the Main Gallery, I'll be performing with one of Larry Koonse's two Jazz Faculty Ensembles here at CalArts.

If you speak CalArtian, you know that the term "Jazz Faculty Ensemble" could be a bit misleading to non-initiates: it refers not to the perfunctory, under-rehearsed dog-and-pony show that most schools' faculty throw together more out of professional obligation than a desire to play together, but rather to instructor-led student groups where the faculty member in question performs with the group at all times. It's been a great experience, one of the specific reasons I sought out this school, and I don't know why more institutions don't run things this way. (Actually, I know exactly why and so do you, but let's just play nice for the moment.)

Having paid the school that single compliment, I'll now add that this first semester has been a real struggle overall, sometimes severely so. There's a lot going on here that simply doesn't make a whole lot of sense, administratively, aesthetically, and socially, and there's a general feeling among the students that we are overpaying for what we are getting. I want to leave it at that for the moment. Perhaps it will all come together next semester or next year, or maybe it has all come apart for good; I can't tell yet. I am at least aware of a smattering of special circumstances which converged this semester that are unlikely to align again while I'm here. Thus, a detailed, point-by-point takedown would be unwarranted and unfair to the many fabulous people I've been privileged to work with thus far. If you were expecting more at some point this Blog Month, I have to apologize and ask you to wait. Rest assured that you will understand this place when I do, and also that if you were looking to resolve seemingly contradictory rumors about it, you're safe in assuming that they are in fact all true.

With six trumpets three tubas, you can do anything

2011-12-13T00:14:00.008-08:00

Tonight, 8pm in the Wild Beast at CalArts.

The "S" Series: S-1

2011-12-12T07:09:00.010-08:00

Tonight, 8pm, Roy O. Disney Concert Hall at CalArts.

Fakery

2011-12-11T23:09:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to wonder if a chart of our collective progress on the technological march towards virtual reality would actually resemble that of an oscillation (i.e. periods of success followed by periods of regression) rather than an exponential curve (i.e. continuous accelerating progress). I say this not because one could reasonably say that we've truly regressed technologically, but because of some recent experiences with fake reality that are more real but less useful (and perhaps more to the point for a musician/artist, less aesthetically pleasing) than the older, less real ones seem to me to be.

As a kid, I was not allowed to gorge myself on video games to the extent of many of my peers; my mother simply would not allow it. I did gorge myself on television, but still less than some. Even so, when today I happen by some bizarre turn of events to catch a glimpse of a cartoon or video game, I'm typically most surprised at (a) the turn towards realism, and (b) how profoundly aesthetically unsatisfying this is to me. It's an old man's gripe to be sure (I'm not yet 30, but in the technological world, that's middle age), and I've heard enough of them directly from old men to be wary of committing the same fallacies. My gut reaction is nonetheless remarkably consistent. Modernist though I claim to be, perhaps I'm finding for the first time some appreciation for the advice of so many conservative composition teachers that imposing limitations on one's process can be beneficial to the outcome. There are more than a few vinyl hoarders and NES players (and conservative composers) who would agree, no doubt cherrypicking their evidence with the utmost caution and backtracking appropriately when confronted about their iPhones.

The reason I bring this up here is that I'm coming to view notation software playback as one of these areas. When I upgraded to Sibelius 6 in 2009, I had been using version 2 since it first came out (yes, that's kind of a really long time). There was quite a bit to learn, a lot of useful new features, and a few real pissers. (The chord symbols! Barf...) The biggest challenge to this day, though, has been the built-in sounds. They are much more "realistic" sounds than the old general MIDI sounds I had become very accustomed to, by which of course I mean that it would now be much easier, possibly even a foregone conclusion, to identify by ear the instrument they purport to represent. (Forget the specific instrument; with the old sounds, you sometimes wondered which instrumental family was in play.) For whatever reason, though, I find them much more difficult to work with: the timbral whole is still less than the sum of its parts.

In some cases, notably the tuba, this is because they've essentially built mistakes into the samples:

Band Teacher Purgatory Sounds Like This

Yes, there's a better than average chance that your garden variety community band tuba player will wobble slightly on a low A before the pitch stabilizes, but seriously guys, let's just shoot for the stars next time and pretend that tubists are at least theoretically capable of emitting a steady tone for more than 2 beats at a time.In other cases, I undoubtedly struggle because I spent an incredibly long time working with the old general MIDI sounds and hence got very accustomed to interpreting them. Space, balance and blend have always been the achilles heels of notation software mockups of through-composed, acoustic music, and I don't think the present results are any more accurate despite representing an obvious attempt to improve in just these areas. I'm left to wonder if I am, in fact, just getting old, or if we had not actually stumbled on a semi-optimal degree of reality, unbelievable as that would have been at the time, in comparison to which the next rung of progress actually looks regressive. Perhaps a virtual reality that is obviously fake would be more useful here than one with loftier aspirations and spectacular failures.

2011-12-10T23:03:00.002-08:00

There's not even a sliver of enlightenment to be had in this space tonight other than what exceedingly little it might be worth for you to know that I have a potentially much more enlightening piece to share which I cannot properly complete without ftp access to my personal website, which some combination of the technological variables at play here simply will not allow at the moment.

In response to my bewilderment at the irreverence for attacks and releases in much live electronic performance, a more well-informed student posited that this merely points to a difference in formality between this musical world and the predominantly acoustic one I'm more accustomed to. I'm skeptical, but not because I want to be: it certainly would be comforting to find technology more consistently functioning properly where the operators are skilled and conscientious artists rather than standard issue IT grunts, but I'm afraid the results are remarkably similar most of the time.

Busted

2011-12-09T08:50:00.002-08:00

Doublethink Invades The West

2011-12-08T14:48:00.008-08:00

Does Capitalism (or what goes for it here in the USA) not demand/engender/impose much the same psychological condition as archetypal Orwellian totalitarianism does? So few of the people I meet who play our Capitalist economic game, musically or otherwise, seem the least bit sincere in either words or actions, and I think this goes beyond the simple fact that convincing someone to purchase something they previously did not intend to purchase requires...well, some convincing. More to the point: no child grows up dreaming of selling jewelry or vetting credit histories, nor do the ones who grow up dreaming to be musicians typically find fulfillment of those dreams playing wedding receptions or church services. It is on that most basic level that sincerity is rendered more or less untenable in our culture, including for those "doing what they love" in service of something or someone that they don't.

This is merely our minimum common inheritance; the insincerity can, of course, be much deeper as well. My time at the airport permanently changed my perspective on this: here you have two groups of citizens ("business travelers" and "security professionals") more or less involuntarily thrust into an acrimonious "us versus them" relationship by economic and social realities (not to mention some questionable reactions to them by our elected officials). No one at these checkpoints wants to be there: Traveling Salesman and Security Guard are not dream jobs. Their unique relationship, of course, is that this is primarily due to the specter of having to deal with the other group! Such it is that the airport security checkpoint became the "divide and conquer" mechanism par excellence as the Bushes simultaneously crashed the economy and began erecting a police state from scratch: throw the middle class out of work and let them choose between selling useless shit and enforcing useless rules, and not just to anyone, but to each other. No wonder sincerity is in such short supply.

The dynamic in the musical world is not quite so sinister, but nor should we simply accept it on account of music being, as I of course have argued with apologies to most of my dearest colleagues, a very sophisticated but ultimately trivial recreational activity. Issues of sincerity are never trivial, and the recreational value of music, if that is in fact its greatest value, suffers tremendously at the hands of the entrepreneurial spirit, dismembered as these hands too often are from their thinking, feeling body.

BM4 Placeholder/"Is anybody actually reading this?" open thread #1

2011-12-07T22:07:00.004-08:00

For the musicians reading:

What is your relationship with scores?

Does seeing the score tend to enhance or detract from your enjoyment of the piece in question?

What do you learn from score study that you cannot achieve by listening to recordings or live performances?

How well could you grasp your own scores if they were not yours and you could not hear them played?

How many scores that you have studied or just skimmed of your most favorite pieces would be dismissed sound unheard by most any present-day grant, admissions or programming committee because of the notation, formatting, and/or engraving?

To jump start discussion, I'll share my answer to the last one: "Most, if not all."

Distance as Illusion in György Ligeti’s Lontano

2011-12-06T09:23:00.007-08:00

More than a mere “transitional” work, Lontano represents an arrival as well, at once an extension of and a departure from the music with which György Ligeti made his name. Lontano no less than the now-archetypal Atmosphères could legitimately be described as achieving a static quality, but these are two very different kinds of stasis. In the case of the former, as the title would suggest, distance is the operative principle, and therefore, one might infer, illusion as well. With increasing distance, large objects appear smaller, loud sounds softer, and bright light dimmer; this is the stasis of Lontano, a matter of perspective rather than an inherent quality of the object itself. Indeed, Ligeti’s communication of metaphorical distance through very real music which also stands exceptionally well on its own is masterful; yet in extending the metaphor a bit further, an important feature of this music is that the closer one gets to the object in question, the greater intensity it displays, thereby pointing to the illusion that distance has created before ultimately restoring it.

Ironically given this emphasis on distance, on a technical level, one might say that Lontano puts micropolyphony under a microscope. In the layering of voices, tight intervals, denial of pulse, and use of cannonic succession, one easily recognizes a clear connection to Ligeti’s by this time well-established methodology. Even so, a direct comparison with Atmosphères suggests a conscious move towards higher resolution and the unified application of this decision across all parameters. This much is clear from the most superficial level right down to the smallest details of pitch, rhythm, and orchestration.

In all but its densest moments, Lontano maintains a notable transparency of texture, perhaps the most striking contrast with Atmosphères given what the two pieces have in common. Concerning the wind instruments, Ligeti leans heavily on the more transparent woodwinds and reserves a sparing (and therefore very traditional) role for the brass in the most intense orchestral climaxes and only very occasionally as autonomous contributors to sparser moments. As the pre-eminently transparent instrumental family, the strings are, of course, central to the orchestration here as well, and Ligeti takes full advantage of their unique capabilities. Mirroring the approach to texture and timbre (and, it should be said, in no small part as a direct result of it as well), interval (if not harmony in the broadest sense) and very occasionally melody are granted moments of notable clarity, and thus a crucial and perceptible (if subsidiary) role in this music. One is reminded in spirit, if not in content, of the music of Berg, conceptually rich atonal music moments of which one cannot help calling “pretty.”

OPENING TEXTURES
The opening thirteen bars or so are remarkable for the uniformity of timbre achieved among instruments from several different families. The tessitura of this section, centered more or less around the pitch Ab4, is ideal for achieving this effect as it places flutes, bassoons, and a lone harmonic-producing cello in ranges which, if not truly “extreme” for those instruments, are nonetheless among the more anonymous and less characteristic. The same could be said of the contrabass and viola entrances in mm. 12 and 13, though by this time the pitch material has become more varied. The brief contributions of three stopped horns (mm. 5-7) and a muted trumpet (mm. 7-8) are the least timbrally anonymous of this passage, though they are minimally disruptive on account of being muted, and add a tasteful, if fleeting, bit of contour and “sizzle” to the texture, perhaps the first hint at the masked intensity of this distant object even as it remains, at this early juncture, still quite far away.

Having established all of that, it is befitting the metaphor of distance (a blurring but not wholly obfuscatory mechanism) that the timbral unification of the orchestra here is palpable without being complete, and that Ligeti obviously intended just this. Though there are many fewer pitches than voices, the first true “doubling” of parts (i.e. two or more instruments playing the same pitches and rhythms for several beats or measures) does not occur until the flute and clarinet sections enter with identical material in m. 14. Until this moment, the severely limited pitch material and independence of line remain somewhat incongruous with each other, as do the meticulous obfuscation of meter through odd subdivisions and the substantial separation of pitch events in real time. The result is something like micropolyphony at rehearsal tempo: the texture suggests stasis yet the rhythmic contour is slightly too deliberate to truly permit it.

To understand the importance of this point, it is useful to remember that Ligeti claimed to have been consciously influenced in his first mature style by a particular psychoacoustic phenomenon which he read about during his early years in the West, namely that humans cannot perceive sounds less than fifty milliseconds apart as discrete events¹. It is worth pointing out, then, that Lontano “by the numbers” was obviously cut from a different cloth. Assuming relatively strict adherence to the unambiguously-stated metronome marking of quarter=64, the length of a single beat in real time can be established as roughly 0.9375 seconds; the real-time values of one-third, one-fourth and one-fifth of a beat (0.3125, 0.234375 and 0.1875 seconds respectively) follow from this value, and can be used to obtain the difference in real-time between virtually any two onsets in the opening, where subdivisions of the beat into three, four and five parts predominate. Further, in dividing 0.234375 again by 4, one finds the duration of even 1/16 of a beat not yet smaller than the 50 millisecond threshold. Such it is that Ligeti does not appear to have granted himself the necessary materials to appeal to this device; rather, to create the illusion of stasis rather than true stasis itself, he has put them under a perceptual microscope, where they are still very efficient in ensuring the absence of pulse, but where individual onsets are nonetheless quite perceptible.

By m. 15, the texture is somewhat flatter even though some isolation of instrumental sections persists. The total amount of material (pitch, rhythm and timbre alike) is greater here, and true “doubling” is in play for the first time. In m. 19, there is a realignment of sorts and a further wrinkle: a tutti rest on beat 3 in the flutes and small subsets of violas and cellos (instruments which had not been coordinated in the preceding bars) before these instruments take up the next micropolyphonic canon together. This is the beginning of the end for the middle ground, the ensuing string-dominated texture moving further yet towards density and stasis.

PITCH IN THE OPENING
It is owing to the transparency of the opening several bars that the perception of melody becomes a possibility, if one less strongly suggested by the score itself than by its realization in the air. After nearly six bars comprised of a single pitch (Ab4), the first change (to G4 in mm. 6-7) is relatively sudden and complete, occurring in eight voices while leaving only three behind, and occupying barely four beats of time. This is then displaced by a yet more sudden (though less complete) migration towards Bb4 across the final two beats of m. 8. As the pace of change accelerates with the addition of the pitches A4 (mm. 9-10), F#4 (mm. 11-12) and B4 (mm. 12-13), an optimization point is reached; that is, the rate of change of pitch has become just quick enough to legitimize a melodic hearing while the overall texture has not yet become too dense to permit it.

By m. 15, the music is teetering on the edge of upsetting this balance without wholly obliterating it. As such, it is more risky to generalize about how this section might be heard by any given listener than it is with the more extreme textures, but this music is, in any case, among the most striking in the piece, and certainly more so very much because of rather than despite its ambiguity. Here, the cannonic lines are comprised of more total pitch-classes and in substantially closer succession than at any previous point, resulting in a heightening of tension. Parts are truly “doubled” for the first time, specifically between flutes and clarinets in mm. 14-15 and among various like string instruments, two or three of which can rarely be considered “doubling” in an orchestral setting, yet by withholding this technique (or at least its application to moving cannonic lines) until this point, Ligeti is able to use it as a gorgeous change of pace. The effect is a step closer to archetypal micropolyphony, but a small one: timbres have just begun to blur and harmony would be difficult to ascertain, but one could not be faulted for hearing melodies (plural) here, perhaps even counterpoint between earliest and latest statements of the line A-C#-C-C#-D#, initiated in m. 14, b. 4 by two second violins, picked up in earnest by the first violins throughout m. 15, and again by oboes and flutes in m. 16, (with oboes in the higher octave and flutes supporting, nearly inaudibly, below). The line D#-C#-B-G#-A# is treated similarly in mm. 18-21, and, as a descending line, lends the passage a certain amount of resolution after Ligeti had previously “left us hanging” on the high D#.

As ponticello strings continue to take over and then, by m. 29, b. 4 are left entirely on their own, the clarity of the opening is conclusively subsumed. It would be difficult to argue, either in terms of the literal content of the score or of elapsed clock time, that Ligeti has not succeeded here in communicating a gradual process of change, and that this does not serve to further the metaphor of distance. Equally important, though, is what the clarity of much of the opening might say about a nonetheless distant object, namely that it is in fact boiling over with an intensity which distance cannot fully mask.

DRAWING NEARER
The next such gradual transition is less gradual (by both standards) as it involves the appearance, propagation and then sudden disintegration of a single pitch-class over less than half the time. This is pitch-class C, first appearing in this capacity simultaneously in piccolo, flute, bassoon and violins in m. 31, and quickly becoming all-pervasive, though not exclusive. Though the winds essentially “join” a string line in progress, their collective force, distinct timbre and statement in rhythmic unison cannot help but create an articulation of structure, even at the severely low dynamic level Ligeti asks for. Predictably, as C becomes more insistent, this repression of dynamics cracks for the first time in the form of crescendi from mezzo-piano (already the loudest dynamic marking to this point) to forte in small groups of strings (first violins in mm. 36-37, second violins in mm. 37-38, and violas and cellos in mm. 38-39). The “boiling over” metaphor is again apt: this is an object which reveals greater agitation the longer it is observed, and is perhaps drawing closer.

The next truly new texture to be introduced begins in m. 41, b. 4, where tuba and a pair of violins are laid bare in their most extreme registers. Such it is that Ligeti continues to walk the line between timbral clarity and obfuscation even with only three instruments playing. Indeed, as contrabassoon (m. 43) and contrabasses (mm. 43, and 46-48) join the fray with similarly extreme low notes, one is reminded that timbre can be as anonymous as pitch in this range. The tessitura then begins to contract ever so slightly. On the high end, groups of violins are added one by one a half-step (m. 47), minor third (m. 48), perfect fourth (m. 49), major third (m. 50), perfect fifth (m. 51) and tritone (m. 53) away from the very highest pair, though these pitches are so high as to more or less defy any melodic or harmonic hearing. The more perceptually obvious relaxation of tessitura happens on the low end, beginning in m. 46, where a gradually ascending bass progression is pieced together (often with overlap) among tuba, contrabass clarinet, various contrabasses and trombones with contrabassoon and a single contrabass anchoring the collection with the original Db1. Like the brass in the opening and the use in the strings of flautando and sul ponticello effects in combination with tremolo from D to E, the contrabass section outburst in m. 51 (Ligeti asks for it to be “like a sudden eruption”) points to the violent intensity that distance has been concealing. The brass are granted their greatest autonomy between G and H, completing this registral contraction.

Perhaps the moment of greatest clarity (though it remains among the most “distant” as well) is the string section entrance the last eighth note before m. 57. The collection consists of every Bb and E from Bb1 to E6 excepting E2, with the top note produced as a harmonic. Here, textural, timbral and polyphonic transparency are all at their height, and stasis (traditionally obtained this time) is near-complete. If the distant object has drawn closer over the preceding several minutes of music, here it most definitely recedes. As the pitch material is gradually diversified and tremolo effects reintroduced after I, density (if still not the most thorough micropolyphonic kind) is, for the first time in Lontano, Ligeti’s modus operandi for an extended period of perceptual and structural time. The strings, befitting their traditional place in the orchestral hierarchy, now carry the load, divided at times into over thirty parts and with most lines doubled somewhere in each instrumental subfamily. Wind sections are initially still treated as units (for example, reeds in m. 65 and horns in m. 73), but by M have splintered nearly proportionately to the strings. At O, a degree of collective behavior is restored, again in the horns and also in the low reeds, prefiguring the striking effect of Q, where the string section, after obliterating the texture for dozens of bars, is silent for seven whole beats and the winds are again featured, treated in a manner strongly reminiscent of the opening. The cascading effect at R is more about range than instrumental family. The strings, having had their moment, are back to being just another group among many, their staggered entrances after R nearly inaudible and their time brief. By m. 106, the contrabasses are left hanging alone, sul ponticello and almost inaudible until another “eruption” begets the next main textural shift. True stasis returns fleetingly in m. 112, marking a major structural division. Rehearsal V is almost the opening in microcosm, and for that matter, under yet further magnification: the various onsets throughout the first three and a half bars are as temporally isolated as nearly any in the score. The sustained string cluster which joins W and X is of no less structural significance than the stasis of m. 112, lending symmetry to this brief interlude and also abruptly bringing it to a close.

The A Tempo in m. 122 also represents a somewhat more “macro” version of micropolyphony, this time as much a matter of the weighting of various lines as of their content. Unlike the opening several bars, where no two parts are precisely rhythmically aligned, here there are only a few distinct parts and each is doubled by several instruments. This has a few important consequences. First, it again makes possible, if only ambiguously, the perception of melody. Though the strings are more or less evenly divided between the three most rhythmically active lines (that is to say between those which would be most readily perceived as melodies) with a few players sustaining longer note values, the distribution is not so even in the winds, with English horn, third bassoon and contrabassoon all playing the same line, and no more than two winds assigned to any of the others. Though for acoustic reasons the English horn, by virtue of being the wind playing in the highest octave, will tend to be heard most readily as the lead melodic voice, the “extra” player here really is the contrabassoon. Ligeti has no two winds performing the same line in the same octave, meaning that giving this line to three voices versus only two for the others is not only a textural weighting but also one of tessitura. (The line does appear in this lowest octave in the strings, but only in one of six divided contrabass parts, a much less substantial voice than Contrabasoon, even at pianissimo). The texture here also serves an important structural role, articulating this moment as something unmistakably new; the distant object is drawing closer yet, soon to arrive at its closest point before receding.

The tremendous orchestral tutti after beat 3 of m. 127 is constructed cannonically from the line G-A-Bb-A-B, an exact inversion of the preceding English horn “melody” (D-C-B-C-Bb). Along with the final emphatic statement of what distance has been concealing, symmetry, it appears, is also gaining importance as the piece wends its way toward conclusion. Discrete structural divisions achieved through variations in orchestral density are also beginning to occur more rapidly. At AA, the high D# in the strings brings the listener as close as one would ever want to get to whatever metaphorical object or idea might have previously been hiding across all that distance. Then, at BB, a truly striking unity of purpose is articulated in the flute section, a unison ascending half-step clearly orchestrated to the fore and impossible to hear otherwise, and followed by numerous ascending and descending echoes to the end, the most unambiguously melodic content in the piece, albeit the most economic as well.

CONCLUSION
Though perhaps destined to be viewed by mainstream observers as an avant-garde work, Lontano really is, in the context of Ligeti’s own work and that of his contemporaries, a piece which thrives where so many others fail, namely on the middle ground. It is music which paradoxically appears clearest at its most distant and denser at it draws closer. The point here of doubling, for example, a sustained woodwind pitch with tremolo sul ponticello violin on the very same pitch is quite different than in archetypal micropolyphony; it is not to create a truly flat surface, but to carve out mere low relief, a masterstroke given the seemingly intractable challenge of musically portraying intensity at a distance. Similarly, rather than using the brute force micropolyphony of Atmosphères to mask timbre entirely, Ligeti masks the masking, so to speak, by constantly inhabiting an ideally ambiguous space between timbral clarity and obfuscation, a sophisticated and ingenious sonic analog to the effect of distance on visual phenomena. As far as this “transitional” work is concerned, the journey is of at least equal importance to the destination.

Notes
1. Griffiths, Paul. Györgi Ligeti. London: Robson 1983. 26.

Fundamentals

2011-12-05T00:31:00.003-08:00

Seeing that my Vikings got Tebowed yesterday, and also that it's Blog Month (yay inanity!), it's worth once again drawing my trademark tenuous analogy between the worlds of athletic and sonic entertainment.

In football, winning trumps everything, but the music or art world equivalent of Tim Tebow can never so prove himself: there is no winning or losing for him in the external world, but rather only in his own conscience. Those of us who work in the aesthetic realm necessarily sacrifice the privilege to conclusively silence critics of our technical means, who are eternally, so to speak, "entitled to their opinions" no matter their ignorance. Like an artist, Tebow can "suck" at the paradigmatic game as codified by small minds while nonetheless "winning" the real one. An artist can only win, however, in his own mind, and such it is that this petty codification is even more damaging to the arts than it is to the aesthetic element of athletics. The recent plights of these two institutions are nonetheless remarkably similar in this way, and tragically so.

That no one from Pop Warner through Division I and now the NFL has coached Tebow out of his serpentine release gives me a glimmer of hope that sports can remain, if only in the hands of the Jordans and Pucketts of this world, an art form. That Tebow's game itself is, like Peyton Manning's, most decisively not aesthetically pleasing is incidental; like the greatest artists, he's winning without all of the fundamentals (excepting the -ism, of course), thus reminding us, even in his awkwardness, that sports used to be compelling on an aesthetic level.

Some Interdisciplinary (but not strictly CalArtian) Observations

2011-12-04T00:31:00.004-08:00

Go on calling music "The Social Art" if you insist. It has always seemed to me that when the occasion is ostensibly social, music (live, recorded or made on the spot) is the musicians' last choice (that is if it is accorded status as a choice at all). Attentive listening and conscientious performance, even if one's standards are not all that high, tend to preclude conversation, but even casual and/or pop-culture-oriented musical events where this is not the case tend to be non-starters when musicians hang out. This is even true among self-proclaimed universalists who belligerently insist that these settings and this music are part of their deal, too.

The top of the list, oddly enough, seems to belong to Blockbuster Hollywood movies.

---

Asked how much time he spends watching movies (whether for study or pleasure), a suitemate of mine here at CalArts, a filmmaker and non-musician, confesses that he spends far more time listening to music than watching films. I can't help but wonder for how many musicians (brass players in particular, and LOOOOW brass players in further particular) the inverse is true?

---

Being part of an "...Institute of the Arts" which boasts Film, Art, Dance, Writing and Theater programs as well as music, one is sometimes put into consternating touch with the value (abstract and monetary alike) of one's own medium relative to the others. How telling that a theater production here can nearly sell out a dozen shows whereas it is almost unheard of for music school productions at any college or university to be either ticketed or reprised.

---

Some dalliances with Art School functions here have reminded me of the absurdity of this world as I have (no doubt in a very limited capacity) experienced it. Concert music becomes a truly social event for the audience only before or after music happens, but visual art openings, in dealing with a silent, atemporal medium, harbor a possibility (more like an inevitability) unknown to musicians in that they are taken to permit socialization and art consumption simultaneously without one completely obliterating the other. Such it is that hardly a single person in attendance at these clusterfucks is paying one bit of attention to the work, a sobering reminder of what those of us who work with the much less forgiving medium of sound are up against.

The Weird: digging it and being it are not the same thing

2011-12-03T15:23:00.005-08:00

The esteemed Daniel Wolf once wrote:

as far as I can hear, Shostakovich's music does not pose a fundamental challenge to the way in which music is made or heard. The conservation of a particular tradition of listening and music-making is an inseparable part of Shostakovich's music; it is music that both demands and fits study and performance in a conservatory environment. For the listener, the parameters of that which is understood to be music are the same before and after the experience of one of his scores. His music, often with great technical virtuosity and direct -- even when sarcastic or ironic -- emotional pull, plays well-behavedly within the established parameters. My ears, however, are always drawn to that which is less well-behaved.

A curious perspective, but one which I have gradually encountered more and more often. As a classmate of mine more succinctly put it, "I dig the weird." A simple statement with not-so-simple implications: I've often felt that, in my own little world, much of what is weird to everyone else is not weird to me, and while I'm sure that both Daniel and my friend could relate similar experiences, what they are describing is nonetheless a very different relationship. As time goes on, I'm less convinced than ever that I myself am of their type: the sensation of "weirdness" (or music "which is less well-behaved") has never been a deterrent on its own, but nor has it ever been enough to win me over, and I've certainly never relied quite this heavily on its sheer presence or absence as the basis for a value judgment. Here I am stuck, as always, between modernism and something else.

A Blasphemous Thought on Cage

2011-12-02T19:45:00.004-08:00

Ever since my first encounters with his writings (shallow readings to be sure, but having a lasting impact nonetheless), I just can't shake the feeling that Cage has even more to offer to traditionalists than to experimentalists. What I mean by this is that his trademark philosophies may have opened up a whole new world, but this doesn't mean they cannot or should not be applied to the old one. Perhaps this requires a certain amount of willful misreading, not only of Cage but also of what I am calling traditional music, yet I see few drawbacks and many rewards to this scenario. What a pleasure (not to mention a relief) it is to hear the sounds of the Eroica Symphony just being themselves; Beethoven's intent need not always be ours.

October November December is Blog Month

2011-12-01T00:46:00.004-08:00

Due to my shipping off to gradyooate school this fall, there was to be no obviously "good" month for this year's Blog Month, so I've put it off until the last possible moment with an eye towards its second half, during which there is no school. As for the first half?

  End of Semester Madness
+ a Tough Blog Month Act to Follow
= Survival Mode

Confused?

Dig prior opening salvoes here, here and here.

Shore up on the wrap-ups here, here and here.

Eat the whole shit sandwich here, here and here.

Blogtasm AcTiVaTe!!!

(And for the record, since it doesn't say so anywhere else on the page, this is the 4th (fourth) iteration of Blog Month here at My Fickle Ears Dig It. Is that clear?)

Any Lengths of Lasting?

2011-11-09T18:20:00.003-08:00

Overheard this afternoon during pre-class chatter:

"The paradigm changes so fast now, you have to make the music today that will be big in six months."

Alternatively, we could aspire to create music which threatens to endure longer than six months.

How Improvisation Enhances Life/Spirituality Through Sound

2011-10-31T13:03:00.005-07:00

How Improvisation Enhances Life

The optimist says, "Life is an improvisation!"

The skeptic says, "There is no such thing!"

We can recognize a certain obvious truth in both of these seemingly contradictory statements, and without resorting to the physiological (i.e. neurological) explanation, be that line of reasoning as it may rather incontrovertible. Put more simply, the term "improvisation" is an exceedingly imprecise one: it describes only our sensation of the act, not the act itself. The "enhancement" in question, then, might be most readily schematized not by setting Improvisation and Life as x-y axes and then seeking points of optimization, but rather by considering the myriad degrees and types of improvisation we engage in; where we were and what we were doing when the act of improvisation seemed impossible; and, by the same token, when it seemed inescapable. This is the empirical approach; for a cultural analysis, substitute matters of taste for those of mere possibility in the preceding sentence.

Performing these two exercises for myself, what I find first and foremost is that improvisation is a useful foil to much "business as usual." This requires, of course, that normalcy be defined as tending toward the premeditated, which is certainly not true in every culture, but my sense is that it is true in those which I have been thrust into most often (and even if premeditation is not truly the norm, it is still, perhaps, overutilized, if not just in my humble opinion). I suppose I'll know that this is no longer a constructive viewpoint when I am being assigned to write a short reflection on "How Planning Ahead Enhances Life." I should reiterate, though, that this dynamic of contrast also exists between specific degrees and types of improvisation, perhaps more powerfully than it does between the premeditated and the spontaneous more broadly construed (overbroad categories, actually, which, as hinted at above, are not always what they seem).

Spirituality Through Sound: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony

It is crucial that I preface my explanation for choosing this piece with the fact that I knew almost nothing about it or its composer when I first heard it, and that it immediately became my "new favorite piece" in absence of any such historical perspective. Spirituality being for an agnostic like me an earthly concern with a finite duration, I think it's valid to respond to an assignment such as this with one's most favorite music, whether or not that music is particularly spiritual in some other way; after all, it is this music which is, literally, all we have to live for. This is a piece of music which I find just this compelling in the abstract, and yet the circumstances of its creation also lend it an intensely spiritual dimension.

Shostakovich had already begun composing his Fourth Symphony when the infamous Pravda article appeared (in January, 1936) condemning his work and putting his very life in danger. His work in progress was if anything more subversive of the party agenda than any which had preceded it, and though he completed it anyway and had even secured a premiere, this was canceled after "...a series of unsuccessful rehearsals clearly influenced by the new condemned standing of its composer." Shostakovich's subsequent contrition, genuine or not, was adequate to save his career (and his life), but he would never truly return to composing in the vein of the Fourth Symphony, a piece which he himself once considered a watershed in his creative development. Shelved by the political climate, the orchestral score was lost during World War II; it was only the later rediscovery of the parts from the canceled premiere that allowed the original version to be reconstructed piece by piece. The work was premiered only in 1960, 24 years after it's completion, and not published until 1984, nearly a decade after the composer's death¹.

It is, in other words, a miracle that the piece exists at all. What lends this history a spiritual profundity, I think, is that it points to the transient, impermanent nature of art, and by extension, of life. The saying goes that you don't truly appreciate what you once had until it's gone, and I think that a similar dynamic exists where the object's provenance will not permit its being taken for granted, even by those who have not actually been deprived of it (and especially with the knowledge that there are many who were.)

Notes
1. Anderson, Keith, "Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43." Liner notes. Shostakovich: Symphony No, 4 in C Minor. Naxos Records, 1993.

Coltrane's Exercises and Excesses

2011-09-10T09:12:00.004-07:00

Musician and blogger Truan Savage has a bee in his bonnet about John Coltrane, as evidenced by several posts on his blog, Savage Music:

The Problem With John Coltrane~~Part 1: The Audience

The Problem with John Coltrane~~Part 2: Technique

Unlearning the Learned and Thoughts on Exercises...

I don't agree with much of what he writes, but I wouldn't take the time to write a dissent of this length if I thought he was a lone wolf. Rather, I think there several issues here that come up again and again, both on- and off-line, that are thus worth chiming in on in depth. Here, then, is my unsolicited reaction.

Where Savage and I agree is that not everyone can be John Coltrane. Where the disagreement lies, I think, is in exactly what conclusions can be drawn from his legacy. In particular, when I read the following paragraph, I felt like I was reading it for the hundredth time:

"An inherent characteristic of Coltrane’s flurrying technique is that it is distracting. That does not need to be a negative property, but unfortunately the legacy that Coltrane sowed through his masterful ability can indeed be distracting in the worst way. Players today have become blinded by technique, and more often than not this preoccupation comes at the expense of good music."

There are many problems here. To start, I don't think it's wise to speak in absolutes about musical perception. Technique as an isolable concept in the mind of the listener cannot simply be taken for granted in this way, the seeming uniformity of experience among present day jazz audiences notwithstanding. But the most insidious part of this paragraph is the final sentence, where we encounter a very common but nonetheless most tenuous assumption, namely that the world is filled with teeming hordes of latent musical geniuses ruined by the scourge of technique, which is largely if not solely responsible for seducing them away from the vital, individualistic work they might have done in favor of the flashy, boring, derivative work that seems to dominate the landscape. This is assuming far too much. These people have nothing to say, and they would not magically find something to say if they had less technique; if anything, their lack of artistry would be even more painful to listen to. If it seems that there are more soulless technicians than middling individualists, this is because even a middling individualism is a hard-won achievement. The tree of musicianship is very tall, and for many players, technique is simply the lowest hanging fruit.

The real "Problem with John Coltrane," then, is that he was both an eminent technician and a potent and eloquent creative artist, and that these two characteristics are inextricable in his music. He always had something to say, no matter the technique involved, yet even his prodigious technique wasn't always adequate to say it. To demonize technique because of something John Coltrane did is to sell him way too short; to demonize it because of something his shameless imitators did is to give them way too much credit. It is a terrible waste of time to complain that subsequent generations of musicians have exhibited only those aspects of Coltrane's mastery which can be taught while remaining deficient in those which can't. It is even worse to draw from this quite predictable outcome the conclusion that technical and creative sophistication are somehow anathema to each other, i.e. that "more often than not this preoccupation [with technique] comes at the expense of good music."

Such observers are in a sense themselves "blinded by technique" moreso even than the objects of their ire, and what they fail to see is that there is no John Coltrane trapped inside all those soulless technicians; there's just a soulless technician with nothing to say. To issue broad condemnations of technical sophistication citing these players as evidence is to let the technique terrorists win, so to speak. Technique is too useful to the rest of us to let a few jerk-off saxophone players ruin it for us for all time, and as long as we don't let them, they can't. So don't, and they won't.

You can argue that there are only so many hours in the day, and that allocating all of them to technical development and little or none to pursuing other aspects of musicianship will cripple the musician. That is very different, though, from arguing that extensive technical development inherently retards the development of these other facets, even when a concurrent effort is made. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that this is the case; what is very clear, though, is that technique is apt to blossom in many players long before a commensurate musico-intellectual maturity can been reached. It is merely a fact of life, then, that more young players see their technical prowess outpace their creative voice than the other way around; a perfectly concurrent development among all aspects of musicianship is, if attractive, neither plausible nor particularly necessary. But what, then, of those who, whether by dint of nature or nurture, never even out, who continue playing boring, derivative, technically astute jazz into their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's? Savage wrote:

...only the most masterful musicians are tastefully capable of balancing endless technical development with musicality. Today, unfortunately, players, listeners and critics alike are much too concerned with technical ability than quality output, and it is because of the success and misunderstanding of Coltrane’s restlessness that this has occurred.

Again, I would dispute the conceit that "technical development" and "musicality" are isolable, mutually dependent forces which can become out of balance with each other in a destructive way. I can only argue anecdotally, but I simply don't see or hear this the same way; there are too many players who demonstrate too many degrees and combinations of the two attributes for me to think that a surplus or deficit of one could render the condition of the other in any way predictable. Surely there are a few technicians who truly neglect to develop musically despite having the potential to do so, but this tells us more about them than it does about John Coltrane.

-----

Aside from Coltrane the saxophonist, there is the question of Coltrane the composer, also addressed by Savage on his blog, and also, in my estimation, misjudged therein. Regarding Giant Steps and its myriad musical and musico-social implications, Savage argues that musicians play the tune more to show off than because they (or anyone else) actually wants to hear it, an assertion which I lack the requisite omniscience to evaluate. I do, however, refuse to accept the supposed smoking gun here, namely that Coltrane himself as well as others around him considered tunes like Giant Steps and Moment's Notice to be "exercises." On this point, Savage writes:

If more young musicians approached these songs the way Coltrane himself clearly approached them, perhaps it would alter the trajectory of much of their music in a positive way."

This is a very troublesome sentence, with a lot hinging on what exactly "approach" means in this context. I suspect Savage is referring here not to the technical approach to learning, practicing and performing the tunes, but rather to their place in the pantheon, the weight they carry socially among musicians, and the frequency with which they are played. And that would imply he believes that we take this music too seriously, a profoundly counterproductive view.

At the very least, Coltrane thought enough of these compositions to record them once, but if that doesn't settle anything, neither does the "exercise" label. Classical composers like Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartók and Ligeti certainly were able to write great music even while consciously and overtly addressing some central technical or pedagogical issue. It would be an utter shame, just as I'd argue it would be with Giant Steps or Moment's Notice*, for this music to be dismissed sound unheard simply because the composer has intentionally imbued it with a utilitarian quality. The world certainly would be a much less interesting place if all the exercises, etudes and inventions were suddenly outlawed from concert performance.

This is not unrelated to the technique issue, for it is precisely when exercises are not taken seriously that they become dry technical displays. There is little pedagogical dispute that the ideal way to practice even the driest of materials, such as scales and arpeggios, is expressively**, meaning making intentional use of a variety of dynamics, articulations, tones, meters and tempos. Giant Steps no less than any other lead-sheet-style composition can be performed mechanically or it can be performed expressively; the challenge of making music over a formulaic structure can be accepted, met, constructively subverted, and so on, or it can simply be evaded. Savage himself notes the repetitive nature of Coltrane's own Giant Steps solo; are we to simply "approach" the changes this way for all time, hiding behind the supposition that Coltrane didn't take his own composition seriously enough to bother making music with it? This is absurd. We not only should take every interpretive challenge seriously, we must. The consequence of the opposite is exactly the kind of empty technical display Savage derides elsewhere in his writing.

Now, perhaps that is an unfair evaluation of his point as everyone is entitled to their own aesthetic judgments and he obviously thinks less of this tune as music than many others do. I can respect anyone's informed judgment that Giant Steps is not a great enough composition to warrant being played as often as it is; I could even make the argument myself. I personally happen to like it enough to remain thoroughly perplexed at the vitriol it can elicit from the blogosphere, and while I'd always like to hear it played better, or differently, I wouldn't ever think to bemoan the frequency with which it's played.

To become truly overplayed, a tune needs to do more than facilitate gratuitous technical display; there are myriad jazz compositions which can be abused in this way, but few of them attain the status that Giant Steps has. The archetypal jam session tune has to have more going for it, combining manageable structural features (say, a short form and simple melody) and wide exposure (say, the title track from an iconic record by a major figure) with some wrinkle that makes it unique and tedium-combatting (say, changes that move around a circle of major thirds rather than a circle of fifths). Viewed through this lens, Giant Steps, like Solar, So What, St. Thomas, Song For My Father, Killer Joe, and so on, was simply made for jam sessions; you could even argue that it fills a niche therein. For these reasons (besides the fact that I actually, for some odd reason, like the tune), it just doesn't bother me that people play it a lot at sessions. That's something that it's good for; we might as well use it.

-----

Finally, a couple of necessary disclaimers. First, it's possible that I simply haven't been given the opportunity to learn to hate the tune the way others obviously have: for one thing, there are no jam sessions in Minneapolis, and for another, if anyone there plays Giant Steps, they sure don't do it in public. The last time I can recall hearing it played live by a locally-based musician was around 10 years ago. Hence, I'm not particularly well-qualified to pass judgment on others who have been beaten over the head with it, though if all it took for them to reach that conclusion was hearing it at a jam session one too many times, I doubt they ever had much of a predilection for it anyway. (Secretly, I still think Girl From Ipanema, Bemsha Swing, and Solar are great tunes even though they're overplayed and I'm thus hesitant to call them.) The upside? You heard it here first: if you hate Giant Steps that much, move to Minnesota! I promise you'll never hear it again. Even if we had jam sessions, we're way too passive-aggressive to ever call it: "Well, I was going to call Giant Steps, but how about Blue Monk instead?"

Second, I play tuba, not saxophone. Giant Steps is not a fait accompli for my instrument, it hasn't exactly been overplayed by tubists, and I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to hack through it from time to time that a self-respecting saxophonist probably shouldn't. This doesn't mean that I'm contributing anything to the world by playing it, but if I seem overly sentimental about the tune, this is part of the reason. Playing melodic eighth note lines clearly at any tempo above quarter=250 is still a real challenge for me, regardless of the changes, and frankly, I'd agree that the Giant Steps changes themselves are not among the most difficult (much more difficult to learn from a changes standpoint, even at its more moderate tempo, was a tune like 26-2, where the sequence is occasionally fudged). I wouldn't bother, though, if I didn't like the tune, nor would I bother with blues, Rhythm, or Impressions changes if I didn't also find each of those structures to offer something vital and pleasurable. Is the 12-bar blues merely "overplayed," or has it rather "stood the test of time?"

By the same token, if anyone reading this comes away with the impression that I worship irrationally at the altar of technique, it's because as a tuba player, my efforts to both assimilate and create roles for the instrument in music in which it does not traditionally participate are constantly hemmed in by insufficient technique, and as such, I view a high level of technical achievement as a necessity. If I show up to a jazz jam without it and someone calls something fast, even a two-chord tune, I literally have to pack up my horn and go home; I've done it before. You'd think I'd be even more alienated than the rest of you based on that kind of experience, but I'm not; all I want is to be a full participant in jazz land, and that means meeting the challenge head-on. Far from skewing our perspective, I actually think this allows those of us who play "non-standard" jazz instruments to see the role of technique more clearly than those who inherit the weight of the saxophone or piano traditions the moment they start playing. These traditions are models of clarity which a tuba player can never hope to fully match; far from just being discouraging, this enables us to proceed uninhibited in refining our technique, secure in the knowledge that no saxophonist or pianist will ever go on their blog and accuse us of being technically overdeveloped.

One teacher of mine defined technique as control, which I think sums it up well: when we control what comes out of our horns, the world is our musical oyster. Facility without control is just a parlor trick; it's the difference between always producing a "correct" sound and always producing the sound you intended to produce. This has absolutely nothing to do with who can play higher, faster or louder, and everything to do with whose intent is expressed most clearly. I for one don't feel that I could ever be too good at the latter, and that we disavow the pursuit of this ideal at our own peril.

*IMHO, Moments Notice, formulaic as it may be, is an entirely different case, a minor masterpiece, hardly overplayed, and utterly undeserving of being dragged through the mud here.

**I would argue for substituting "intent" for "expression," but that's a subject for a future post. In the interest of clarity, I've used the more widely accepted term for the musical phenomenon I was referring to.

Location

2011-09-09T07:31:00.003-07:00

I am now located in Valencia, CA where I'll be working towards an MFA in the Performer-Composer program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), as well as playing outdoor basketball in January (awesome).

–

2011-08-05T21:13:00.001-07:00

The New Traditionalist Critique?

2011-07-02T22:06:00.037-07:00

The following recent comments from two respected older jazz musicians both level an accusation towards jazz academia that I find somewhat surprising.

First, here's drummer Ralph Peterson interviewed by pianist George Colligan:

GC: How important is it to have musical heroes?

RP: I think if you don’t know how to play like somebody else first, you can never arrive at what somebody can identify as your own style. That’s another problem with what’s going on right now. All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style.

GC: Before they are ready.

RP: I’m telling you…. they ain’t got no fucking style. I don’t have no fucking style. My style is copying the style of the people I love and the way I combine it and that’s nothing more.

GC: But it has come out as your own identifiable style?

RP: Yeah, the way I combine these musical things is not going to be the way you combine them, even if we study the same guy’s playing.

Next, here's a passage from an article by bassist Chuck Israels:

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of "original thought" is the most fraudulent and destructive element in the institutionalized process of jazz education. Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied "real time" search for "what to play", resulting in frustration for the student and the audience. The usual result is awful gibberish which ought to be embarrassing to all parties but which seems to be not only condoned but encouraged by those jazz educators who misunderstand the process of improvisation.

What we're accustomed to hearing, of course (or at least I am), is not that universities fail to impart style to their jazz students, but that this is, to a fault, all that they do, churning out soulless virtuosic clones in the process. A certain conformity among academically trained jazz players is indeed observable (and in many ways unfortunate), but I'm less convinced than I once was that this is particularly avoidable, or that it is in any way unique to the academic environment. As Peterson says, players with similar influences can (and should, and often do) arrive at distinctive personal styles nonetheless; I do think, though, that this presupposes a certain breadth of influences, as well as a generally staunch work ethic, and I'd say that these two characteristics are typically in short supply, not just among college music majors, but among most communities of musicians I've interacted with across many styles and career paths. Hence, in my mind, putting it all on the academics isn't entirely fair. These considerations, along with its malleability to so many different agendas, make the "clone" critique too easy to level, glossing over more substantive issues. To that end, the present accusations would seem to raise the possibility that this old trope, whether it's legitimate or not, has finally gotten under the academics' skin, and that they've (over)reacted accordingly. Are schools really feeling increased pressure to deliver more individualists and fewer stylists? Is this creating a scorched-earth mentality in jazz academia? Or are these two musicians just blowing smoke? I'm intrigued without being encouraged.

Both statements are rather severely worded, appealing to the notion of pressure or coercion. (Peterson: "All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style." Israels: "Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied 'real time' search for 'what to play'"). Without specific examples, I'm left to guess who might be doing the pushing and where they teach, but I will say that this strikes me as a very unlikely critique of jazz education, not only in my direct experience, but also in what I've been able to glean second hand from peers who attended different schools than I did. When we vent about our schooling, it's not about having been forbidden to have models, but rather about having had them prescribed for us. Israels argues against this, saying that, "A poor model is better than none...Get a grip, any grip; then move on to a firmer one." This is a refreshingly pluralistic statement, and on those grounds alone, I'm on board. However, the bigger topic under discussion here isn't stylistic pluralism, but rather the merits of establishing a single, pervasive model at an early stage of musical development. I'm less comfortable with this idea for a variety of reasons, some philosophical, and others personal.

My own number one critique of jazz education has always been it's poverty of style-neutral pedagogical discourse; put another way, that the study of improvisation is only ever approached through the lens of particular styles (usually bebop) and never the other way around. Though I respect and agree with allowing students to choose which players or styles they might organize their study of jazz around, I disagree that improvisation cannot also be profitably studied abstractly or autonomously, and I don't think it's far-fetched to suggest that jazz students might benefit immensely from at some point being made to confront the practice of improvisation unburdened by their study of particular jazz styles or players. I consider improvisation to be roughly, if not perfectly, analogous to technique, and just as one's breathing or lip flexibility won't develop beyond an elementary stage without occasionally being isolated from the myriad other things one has to think about when performing, so too one's general improvisational technique can and should be isolated if it is to be developed to its fullest potential.

My purpose here is not necessarily to insist that the "frenzied real time search for what to play" is a viable performance strategy, nor even that it is, strictly speaking, a logical possibility, and I'll leave more specific hashing out of the nature of thought and the inescapability of influence to the neuroscientists and philosophers. My point is simply that attempting such a thing can be usefully informative about the state of one's own playing, thought and identity, and when done in the practice room rather than on stage, it can't possibly hurt anything. An art which stubbornly refuses to so much as entertain the occasional "romantic illusion" is one which I want no part of. One certainly could argue that style is inescapable, yet I'd say that I've learned the most about myself as an improvisor by finding out what happens when I try to escape it anyway. Don't just tell me that I'm bound to fail; I want to know how and why. This is invaluable information for a musician to have about themselves, and students shouldn't be discouraged from attempting to ascertain it.

I spout a fair quantity of abstract philosophical speculation in this space, but on this issue, my opinion is overwhelmingly informed by my own experiences. Having now been out of college longer than I was in, it's more apparent to me than ever that I've gained the most from intense study of a small amount of material over longer periods of time, and little-to-nothing from the opposite; but I also feel that my earliest such efforts created too many blind habits and not enough flexibility (again, the consequences of approaching improvisation solely through the lens of style; if only I'd understood it better). I'm particularly troubled by Israel's "favorite musician" standard, as this represents an even narrower band of influence than that which I engaged with at this stage. This was a time when, like many teen musicians, I'd only recently had my musical awakening, and the impact of having located "the real shit" meant that I fawned over virtually anything I heard. Once I'd heard a lot more music, though, this fawning subsided and I had a real problem, namely that my playing had grown up around models which were no longer as important to me as they had once been.

I've truly disavowed very little over the years, but even so, the impact of one's first influences can be all-encompassing, and even slight changes of taste later on can create crises of identity. This is more or less my story. All of this was magnified considerably when I became interested in non-jazz improvisational musics, but by that time, I was already fighting, if not yet winning, the battle. An overbearing teacher pushing me to sound more original would have been superfluous because I was, rightly or wrongly, strongly predisposed to play that role for myself. I was fortunate not to have too many run-ins with overbearing traditionalists either, and where they did occur, they were less run-ins that directly affected my academic standing than they were of the off-handed-codgerly-remark-in-a-masterclass variety.

There are many facets of my musical education which experience has since suggested might have been more productively undertaken working backwards from what conventional wisdom dictates. The stylization question is at the top of this list. To return for a moment to the technique analogy, one would never tell a student that "a poor model is better than none" with regard to general instrumental technique because poor habits must ultimately be unlearned, and they are harder to break than they are to develop. Perhaps the analogy to stylization is not a perfect one, but my own ongoing process of unlearning much of my earliest stylistic conditioning has made me wish a thousand times over that I had focused on more broadly applicable improvisational skills as a teen and saved deeper study of players and styles for later, when I really knew what I wanted, and when my ability to develop stylistic fluency without relying on blind physical habits was more fully developed. (Whereas Israels' twice uses the word "habits" favorably, it has always been a jazz ed bugaboo in my book.) It is, of course, completely subjective what constitutes a "poor" model stylistically, and less so (though, I hasten to add, not entirely) what constitutes a poor model technically, and that's where the analogy breaks down; all I'm saying is that when I was 17, I had no idea that my own stylistic orientation might change, and under those circumstances, it has proven imprudent to grasp at the lowest hanging stylistic fruit. This is why I like to say that stylization is an advanced topic, not a beginning or intermediate one.

I've written recently about the mass disavowals of jazz among twenty-something peers, which I'm not convinced should be taken as an indictment of either jazz generally or its academic manifestations specifically, but which I am convinced is an observable trend which demonstrates the unlikeliness that your favorite musician when you're 18 will still be your favorite musician when you're 22. Settling on a stylistic orientation (or a constellation of them) is an unpredictable long-term process, and one which it could be argued that the attentive and driven musician never truly completes. In any case, to venture far enough down this path to attain even a transient stability requires a breadth of listening and study that most undergraduates won't manage to acquire before graduating. (In my case, having this forced on me by musicology professors rather than being left to my own devices sapped my very will to undertake it, and I've only recently recovered). If there's a good chance you haven't yet heard or even heard of your "favorite musician," then it's too early to invest disproportionately in imitation of a convenient model that you might not hold in such high regard shortly thereafter. Many students will suffer through this process, as I did, and survive more or less in one piece; I'm not convinced, though, that it is either ideal or unavoidable.

What else to say, then, about Israels' dissatisfaction with young players not being able or willing to name a favorite musician than that the very idea becomes increasingly untenable as one's breadth of listening experience accumulates, the best work of great artists therein coming to stand in equally high relief not only from the work of less accomplished contemporaries, but also from the bulk of their own output. Shostakovich is one such gloriously uneven composer: he wrote one of my five favorite pieces of music, but only two of my fifty favorite and probably not three of my hundred favorite. Were I to bump into Professor Israels in the hallway, Wayne Shorter would be my gun-to-the-head answer (probably after some throat clearing), both in terms of my overall attraction to his music and also time spent studying his style; yet his work is also uneven, perhaps moreso than some of the other candidates, and it doesn't really serve anyone's purposes to deny that. I think that the scale on which purposeful musical assimilation operates is much smaller than that of the Favorite Musician: rather, particular records or tunes, even particular moments in particular performances of particular tunes, are what we're really after. If "romantic illusions" about jazz are indeed to be avoided, then academia certainly should cultivate a willingness to judge case-by-case rather than constructing shrines. (Shit, even traditionalists have dirty words for people who indiscriminately worship a brand name.)

I'll close with a more personal reason I'm not comfortable naming a favorite, which is that the particular strain of wild-eyed idolatry that prevailed for many years among followers of Parker, Coltrane and others makes me very uneasy. From Phil Woods' forgery to Jon Faddis' soul patch to whoever started this nonsense about bebop being "the music of the future," no one has made it more difficult for my generation of jazz students to have "musical heroes" than those members of the older generations who have taken their own hero worship to such irrational, destructive, narcissistic heights. Seriously, guys, if this is a problem at all, it's on you and not on us. You showed us all the wrong ways to have heroes; forgive us, then, for being nonplussed when you ask us to name ours.

T.K.O. in Gamers vs. Audiophiles

2011-06-11T21:49:00.002-07:00

Yesterday, I discovered that the local Radio Shack (in the poor neighborhood) no longer stocks plain old headphones. Instead, they exclusively carry "headsets" with a single earpiece and a microphone for speaking. While the pictures on the packaging show smiling young women in phone banks, it can safely be inferred that the target market for these devices is, in fact, young male gamers, who apparently now outnumber headphone users to such an extent that the more specialized devices are no longer worth stocking.

A trip to a nearly equidistant Radio Shack (in the cake-eater neighborhood) was more successful as customers there have their choice of several sets of headphones ranging from $14.99 to $99.99 (as well as the same selection of headsets located in a completely different part of the store). Since I seem to destroy these things regardless of quality or price, I opted for the bottom-of-the-barrel set, which is something musicians aren't suppose to do (or at least not publicly admit to doing), but in my world, harmony and counterpoint are the cake, everything else is the icing, and Grainger and Ravel are booo-ring.

An aside: a techie acquaintance chides me for shopping at Radio Shack in the first place, a chain which he says "sold out" to lowest-common-denominator consumerism years ago (indeed, as I found, it's an ongoing process). I'm a musician, not an electrician; record stores, jazz clubs and bandmates are entities capable of selling out, but electronics stores are not. When I need a piece of gear, I need it fully assembled and functional, not in raw component form, and I'm pretty much at the mercy of other people/entities who can provide such services. For reasons I won't go into, I've boycotted Target and Best Buy for years, and I have to assume that Wal-Mart is a nonstarter for anyone reading this, as it is for me. Chances are better that I simply don't know about Radio Shack's dirty laundry than that they have none; anyone out there got the goods and want to force me to become a headphone-maker? (Yeah, I'm sure it's all slave labor anyway...any American-made headphones out there?)

Blogging The Spare Parts

2011-06-04T11:39:00.004-07:00

Here's a doodle that grew into a sketch and stumbled haphazardly to quasi-completion:

Prelude for Three
Listen (MP3)
Download Score (PDF)

This is perhaps the only kind of music I can write pretty much on command, and when I'm in between projects and sit down to brainstorm for the next one, this is usually the first thing that comes out. I often keep the sketches but rarely ever end up using them; there isn't often enough material from which to build a substantial piece, and it's too damn pretty anyway. I've long maintained split musical personalities (classical/jazz, written/improvised, tonal/atonal) that operate in relative ignorance of each other at least as often as they cross-polinate, but it sometimes surprises me even so that I might produce something myself that would be, like this little trinket, likely to bore me to death if someone else had written it. I suppose that's why I've summarily tacked an ending on it and moved on rather than going for broke; and yet, there's definitely an attraction here, enough at least that I'm not completely ashamed to make it public when it could have, with less effort, been buried in the oblivion of my hard drive. Considering its brevity and the paucity of actual music that I post here, though, the oblivion of this blog seems the more appropriate one.

Though I folded in this instance, I increasingly find myself seeking to redeem such materials by subjecting them to "virtuosic" development, which represents an unlikely about face in some ways. In my younger days, I believed in an idea of "pure" inspiration whereby the very distinction between material and development was impossible to make. I still find this "improvising to paper" approach to suit my needs in many cases, but I certainly appreciate large-scale development more than I did previously. Here, I guess, is yet another of those balancing acts so typical of creative disciplines.

Finally, I wonder about potential practical uses for such neo-tonal miniatures. There is a dire need for educational music that introduces, for lack of a better way of putting it, "20th Century" musical content in a technically accessible way, and while there's nothing much here approximating what I would consider to be dissonance, the chromaticism would present interesting challenges (reading and hearing alike) to young players who have just learned their chromatic scales, as well as to more advanced players of transposing instruments who are learning to read in concert pitch. Finding K-12 educators interested in prioritizing these topics can be elusive, though, and so I'm not rushing to find a publisher.

Operating in the Affirmative

2011-05-28T16:28:00.004-07:00

IDENTITY

As a music student, I grew up with two contradictory pieces of advice which I was never able to reconcile. On one hand, as a future teacher, I was cautioned that one should always give advice in the affirmative; in other words, that telling a student "Do this!" was preferable to saying "Don't do that!" Nevertheless, "Don't sound like a tuba!" has been a staple of music school lexicon for my generation, most especially regarding the transcription of repertoire that predates the instrument, but by no means only in this case. This advice happens to be worded in a fashion that goes against the prevailing wisdom of contemporary educational psychology, but that is hardly its most problematic aspect. Rather, it seems to assume that anything which is idiomatic to the tuba itself is inherently undesirable, or perhaps even that there is no such idiom in the first place. By this logic, those of us who play the tuba are mired in a perpetual state of imitation which precludes not only a consummation of our instrument's true artistic potential and identity, but ultimately our own as well.

Arnold Jacobs famously remarked that, “The challenge of an accompanying instrument is a limited challenge and develops a limited musician,”¹ and encouraged tubists to use music originally written for other orchestral instruments as a means of attaining greater artistry. This, of course, should continue to be something that all instrumentalists task themselves with; rather, it is the idea that this process must be undertaken in order to mask the inherent deficiencies of the tuba that is an outmoded one. After all, something must be idiomatic to the tuba, but the challenge in forging these statements is primarily conceptual, not technical, and Jacobs’ admonition is no less true in the former area than the latter. It is this greater conceptual challenge of consummating the tuba’s identity (as opposed to the more limited one of evading it) that simply necessitates artistic and pedagogical frameworks dealing in the affirmative, frameworks which have been notably slow to materialize relative to recent progress in virtually every other facet of tuba playing (to say nothing of contemporary musical thought as a whole).

For the sake of comparison, consider the staggering variety of effects obtainable on string instruments, including the ability to imitate other orchestral voices. It is nonetheless difficult to imagine a string teacher telling a student, "Don't sound like a violin," even though there are markings, such as flautando, which more or less say just that. What's remarkable about this particular term? For one thing, it is specific and unambiguous in locating the object of imitation; it is also given, as every teacher knows it should be, in the affirmative; but most importantly of all, the instruction flautando was not imposed on the violin from the outside, but rather refers to an effect that is both idiomatic to and relatively easily obtainable on the instrument. Because tubists envy violinists for so many simpler reasons, it is unlikely that the privilege to be provided a clearly stated sonic reference point without the accompanying divestment of identity so characteristic of the tuba world has made many tubists’ lists, but it is at the top of mine. Our somewhat more limited (though by no means fatally so) sonic palette makes it awfully tough to beat string players at their own game, and so the obvious pedagogical value of pursuing this kind of imitation on tuba must not lead us to view it as an end unto itself. This is, ideally, a process of trial and error which ultimately reveals more about the tuba than it does about the object of imitation, the value of the experimental journey therein trumping that of the imitative destination and affirming rather than denying our unique identity and value.

NEW MEDIA

The artistic contributions of the great 20th Century player-pedagogues whose teachings now comprise the mainstream of tuba pedagogy were frequently imitative. The obvious explanation for this is that adequate solo repertoire for the tuba simply did not exist in their time, leading players to rely heavily on transcriptions, and therefore, to overtly imitate other instruments in the interest of authenticity. I would argue that there is more to it than that, though, starting with the question of instrumental advocacy. Compared with other musicians, tuba players have long been disproportionately concerned with changing minds and overcoming stereotypes about their instrument and those who play it. Did I not think this was in some sense a worthy endeavor, I would not have taken the time to write such a lengthy reflection on it. I do believe, however, that as harmless as this aspiration might be as one facet of a larger artistic vision, it becomes extremely problematic in an all-encompassing role as the tubist's raison d'être.

The efficacy of instrumental advocacy being mediated almost entirely by the sheer number of people it is able to reach, any musical product that sells poorly is inherently incompatible with it. Indeed, because unfamiliar musical styles tend to be an even tougher sell than unfamiliar media, astute instrumental advocates tend to avoid pushing the musical envelope at all costs, hoping instead that their (novel) horns might ride the coattails of their (pedestrian) programming. Such it is that tuba players’ pathological preoccupation with advocating for their instrument has mediated their artistic decision making substantially towards the conservative end of the spectrum, and that not even recent technical advances have succeeded in eroding their galling contentedness with this low-brow musical purgatory. But does the instrument, novel as it remains to many, not simply demand stylistic innovation? Does stylistic innovation not simply necessitate new media? Are these two ventures not inherently symbiotic artistically, regardless of whether they are successful commercially? History certainly would suggest so.

Of course, as the greater landscape of artistic-versus-commercial polemics goes, The Case of the Middlebrow Tuba Recital hardly registers. (There are, of course, many commonalities here with the entire brass world, but even taken together, we comprise only a tiny corner of the musical universe.) It is, however, a particularly unfortunate example on account of the possibilities it has left untapped, possibilities on which tubists hold an enviable monopoly. Consider that more recent innovations in new media (particularly the personal computer) have been said to be bringing about a “democratization of creativity” through increasing affordability and ease of use. If you make your living creating, this is good for society and bad for business; tubas, however, are still expensive to acquire and difficult to master, and it is hard to imagine either of these conditions changing substantially or quickly enough to create an overabundance of skilled tuba playing the same way digital technology has made mere hobbies of more than a few formerly lucrative vocations. Newspapers and compact discs die slow, painful deaths, the postmodern era we live in elicits constant complaints that everything has already been done, and yet it remains so obvious to so many of us who play it how much has not been done with the tuba! The other creatives would want to kill us if they knew we were dallying with the likes of Alec Wilder and Léo Delibes while we could have been forging the next musical epoch before anyone else saw it coming.

It is high time for our hyper-sycophantic tuba culture to rethink placing such disproportionate emphasis on convincing idiot savant in-laws, blue-haired churchgoers and stylistic-purist colleagues that we are worth the air we breathe. I do not apply the term “new media” as mere hyperbole, for the void that negation culture has created also presents an unparalleled opportunity for contemporary tubists. Yet while the various possibilities dangle, the artistic vacuum of instrumental advocacy feeds back on itself. Many tubists and a few sympathetic outsiders who grew up with this culture developed understandable fondness for the players and works which shaped it. Some of their students inherit this fondness through no fault of their own. Instrument-specific organizations, conferences and festivals sprout up, serving primarily as outlets for the peddling of negation culture wares and premature celebrations of organizational history. The outcome, paradoxically, is an affirmation of negation, an overwhelmingly backward-looking embrace of the specific players and works that helped the tuba take its first baby steps towards the limelight, albeit dressed up variously as a flute, violin or cello.

While it would be foolish to dismiss and forget this work outright, it would be a worse tragedy for the story to end here. Imitation of other instruments will always be part of tuba playing, as it is part of mastering most any instrument, but the ultimate goal must always be to sound like a tuba, even (or perhaps especially) if that means playing the tuba in a way that no one ever has. Future generations of tubists must not be allowed to believe that the greatest thing they can accomplish is to sound like something they are not. We will continue to imitate all kinds of things in the interest of musical growth, but we must not be afraid to form our own idiomatic statements, and consequently, an identity based on sounding like ourselves rather than like something else. This is where negation culture and instrumental advocacy have failed us, and also where future generations of tubists can and must make their greatest contributions.

DIRECT PATHS

Any musician seeking to identify what exactly it was that got them “hooked” on music in the first place in hopes of reproducing that effect on their own audiences is bound to discover a process which lays bare the curious and awkward relationship between self-discovery and externally-imposed learning like few other areas of musico-pedagogical inquiry can. For many, this is wholly or partially a matter of developing a theory of causality between music and the emotions, an area of musicological discourse which, even among professionals, is dominated by a colloquial imprecision unbefitting one of Western musical thought’s great unresolved polemics. Nowhere is this more counterproductive than in pedagogical matters, where such flawed logic can be propagated in the minds of future generations of musicians (and in the case of formal academic training, subsequently held over their head for a grade). A renewed focus on direct paths to musicianship is in order, one which rightly denies the feasibility of reverse engineering music’s emotional impact, and instead deals wholly in terms of its root cause: namely, sound.

That different listeners may experience unique emotions during the same musical presentation is well-documented. This is not merely an unavoidable fact but also an essential form of biodiversity in any musical ecosystem without which the collective creative ferment of society would become dull and monotonous, and as such, this diversity is to be celebrated, not lamented. Yet many otherwise well-intentioned efforts in the area of music appreciation continue to treat it as a pathology, assuming instead that the ultimate goal of music education and outreach is to educate listeners into behaving alike rather than enabling each one of them to “find their own voice.” (Trite as it is, this latter phrase, so often applied to music-makers but never, ever to listeners, really must to attain this broader currency if such outreach is to succeed in any meaningful way). There are many artistic and pragmatic reasons why such efforts have very low success rates, but their ignorance of (if not outright hostility toward) the diversity of their audience tops the list. Instead, I would argue that we must proceed not as if widely well-received pieces of music are those pieces which many people have learned to like, nor as if they are pieces which particularly strongly suggest or impose a certain listening style, but instead see them as music which appeals to the greatest total number of unique individual listening styles.

As with the question of musical emotion itself, though, this is a framework and not a model. Indeed, such modes of thinking most appropriate to the workaday business of a life in music are not usually good recipes for the creative process itself, heartily resisting reverse engineering for this purpose. The universally loved piece of music, hence, is the ultimate red herring in our hyper-diverse musical culture, one which many artists pursue nonetheless only to find themselves headed in the opposite ethical direction from that in which they initially intended to proceed. The desire for mass appeal is the only force in the universe both powerful and insidious enough to mitigate humanity’s collective aesthetic diversity in favor of the dullest conformity, leading the work of artists of wildly diverse backgrounds and circumstances to converge upon a staggeringly tiny set of outcomes. This is why one cannot simply equate the accessible with the altruistic, nor the esoteric with the nihilistic, for ultimately, the more artists who pursue the same recipe for mass appeal, the more similar their work becomes, and the fewer total listeners they serve. The artist who creates music that anyone could have made robs the world of the music that only they could have made. If musicians have a moral obligation to the world, it is not to procure the largest possible audience for themselves, but rather to meet those unmet musical needs that only they can meet. That means following their muse even when nobody else follows them.

To this end, the physical, sonic phenomena which are ultimately responsible for any emotional content one might ascribe to music are best dealt with directly rather than obliquely. As just one element of musical appeal, whether widely shared or highly contentious, “emotion” per se cannot be dealt with generically. The range of possible emotions is too great, and most every conceivable emotion has been reported as a response to music by someone at some point. It should follow from this realization that musicians cannot learn to emote musically simply by emoting generically; there must be a more direct path. The challenge here lies in striking a productive balance between the conscious and subconscious in order to develop an informed fluency that is equal parts flexible and reliable.

One must be immediately suspicious of any musico-pedagogical approach that bypasses the conscious mind too greatly. On one extreme, there is so-called “playing by feel,” a prominent example of which is the application of descriptive terms to musical phrases in order to elicit a certain musical result from the student without helping them to recognize and understand the technical factors at play. The other extreme is the “trained monkey” phenomenon, where a physical task is simply repeated ad nauseum until it becomes a habit or reflex rather than a consciously executed action. Both methods facilitate strong results only when applied to a relatively narrow range of demands, and both severely limit the student’s adaptability to unfamiliar musical settings, most especially on short notice. A pedagogy better suited to consummate the student’s musical individuality rather than stifling it would deploy such extreme measures only in proportionally extreme situations, otherwise opting for the direct path of developing technique through imitation, adaptability through variation, and creativity through subversion. The exceedingly general, even trite, nature of this approach is not its weakness but rather its strength, as it is thus applicable to a broad range of musical styles rather than just one or two, and therein affords the student greater opportunity to personalize their technique.

Success in this realm is achieved first and foremost by putting aside (if not just for a moment) any sedimented emotional, literary and functional associations that have been imposed on musical works from the outside, and instead concerning oneself wholly with (1) inventorying and analyzing cherished sonic experiences one wishes to have inform their playing, and (2) developing the ability to both recreate and vary them at will using one’s instrument. Students should have as much say as possible as to which ingredients get added to their musical melting pot. This ensures maximum emotional investment in the process by enabling them to create music which reflects their identity, not just that of their teacher or institution. Musicians who are inclined and empowered from an early age to engage with a wide rather than a narrow range of musical styles will ultimately find greater fulfillment and create more compelling work.

In order to achieve any particular result, the student first must consciously understand how it is achieved. While the teacher should use whatever means necessary to elicit the desired sonic results from the student when such sounds are new or unfamiliar, it is crucial that the student ultimately come to understand what made these results possible on a technical level, and that they leave lessons armed with as many relevant approaches for reinforcing such newly acquired skills as the teacher can provide. Where this information is communicated clearly, the student is enabled to take ownership of their development, ultimately becoming their own best teacher.

Varying amounts of repetition must be used to adjust how conscious the student is of their newfound technique, the degree to which it is applied always being a function of the student’s particular musical ends and the given technique’s role in them (fundamental or interpretive; highly internalized or highly intentional). It is lamentable that brass players in general tend to be notably intolerant of variation from traditional technical approaches, a situation which will continue to retard their collective artistic progress if not appropriately relaxed among future generations. While many brass students will undoubtedly continue to choose the traditional approach to their instruments, students who wish to fruitfully problematize any facet of it should be engaged on their own terms, and no fundamental technique should be off limits to constructive scrutiny.

Physical, sonic phenomena must be the unit of currency in any economy of musico-pedagogical ideas. Subjective emotion being an effect of such phenomena and not a cause, it tells us very little about how a performer might create or recreate a musical moment. By opting for the more direct path to musicianship, students can acquire the knowledge and ability to consciously and purposely realize musical intent and therein make contributions to music and the world that are bigger than themselves. Insofar as desired emotional responses to music are ultimately caused by sound, pedagogy must concern itself first and foremost with nurturing the student's ability to intentionally create sound using their instrument. Hence, rather than leaving students grasping for sonic equivalents to their unique emotions, teachers must ask students to (1) identify the sonic characteristics which lend a given performance its perceived emotional qualities, (2) imitate and vary these devices, and (3) apply the personalized devices to their performances as they deem appropriate. This is first and foremost a creative endeavor, akin to composing or improvising: the ultimate goal is not merely to "paint by number" by compiling an inventory of devices to be drawn upon one at a time without variation, but instead to synthesize this sonic inventory into a unique, personal voice that is never manifested the same way twice.

TONE AND TIME

In his 1967 essay "The Tonal Ideal of Romanticism," musicologist Edward Lippman makes a compelling case that the related qualities of “vagueness” and “blending” were characteristic and intentional elements of much nineteenth century classical music. Many of the composers Lippman singles out as especially important exponents of this aesthetic are the very same composers who first made frequent and effective use of the tuba and its predecessors, thereby validating and solidifying its place in the modern orchestra. In turn, much of this music continues to loom large in the world of orchestral tuba playing, most notably that of Wagner, whose personal theater was built with an especially long reverberation time and a hood covering the recessed orchestra pit, and of Bruckner, who, in Lippman’s words, “takes as a model the diffused and collective unity of the organ.”²

Both facets of Lippman’s romantic tonal aesthetic ought to be of interest to tuba players, though for different reasons. “Fusion, or blending” refers to the treatment of the orchestra as a unified timbral whole rather than a disparate collection of voices. This obfuscation of differences of color among the instruments resulted in large part from the previously unprecedented freedom with which romantic-era orchestrators mixed them, and the advent of the tuba could certainly be seen as furthering this aim by providing a true bass voice which was not only timbrally versatile enough to anchor both the conical and cylindrical brass sections separately, but also to unify them with each other when needed. However, it is the second characteristic, “vagueness,” on which I want to focus.

Ours, of course, remains among the most problematic instruments in the modern orchestra as far as directional clarity of sound is concerned, and so there is a special irony for tuba players in Lippman’s characterization of the era (“Hey, that’s our era!”) as not merely tolerating but in fact desiring a tonal “lack of definition.” Compositional necessity is a sexier raison d’être than tonal vagueness, but if Lippman is correct in citing the latter as a significant and intentional aesthetic choice among romantic era musicians, one wonders if our horns were not in fact birthed out of both concerns, if not necessarily in equal parts.

Whether or not there is any merit to such speculation, the idea that the tuba might reflect or even embody ideas and events larger than itself (indeed, to hear Lippman tell it, larger than music as well), is tantalizing in a way, for it is just this sort of inextricable link with historically significant modern music (and, where relevant, the broader world of art and ideas behind it) which can ensure an instrumental culture’s vitality for decades, if not centuries. And while compositional necessity was undoubtedly a greater force behind the advent of the tuba, there is no reason to view the kind of connection I am describing as achievable only at an instrument’s birth, nor only out of the most urgent artistic necessity (the saxophone’s centrality to American jazz and popular music provides the most visible support for this claim). What is required, simply, is an ear to the ground and a willingness to experiment.

If it is true, as it seems to be, that the aspect of the tuba (the sole aspect, really) which justifies its existence in the orchestral world is also its greatest handicap in virtually every other musical context, then it is also true that, as with the broader question of identity, the challenge in overcoming this handicap is presently more conceptual and cultural than it is technical. After all, the instruments, pedagogy and acoustical spaces tubists need to find artistic success outside of the orchestra pit all exist, and the repertoire, which has been slower to materialize, cannot be far off. What is spectacularly and painfully absent, however, is an instrumental culture which values these extra-orchestral possibilities to a degree commensurate with their artistic potential. If the need for such a thing is not already obvious, consider that Lippman, an eminent musicologist of his day writing here in an area of specialty, does not once refer to the tuba despite numerous readymade opportunities to do so. Such is the extent to which today’s tubists have come to need this aging repertoire even more than it needs them.

It is one thing to show the tuba to be capable of more than what it is asked to do in the orchestra; it is another thing entirely to show these capabilities to be useful. No matter how great the skill and artistry of future generations of tuba players, these generations will be stifled at every turn by any musical culture which places the same disproportionate emphasis on 18th and 19th century orchestral repertoire as is placed by the institutions through which most tuba players today receive their musical training. In order for other contributions to be valued, the musical styles and idioms in which they are to be made must be valued as well. The task of advocating for these new musical styles and idioms is both more vital and more arduous than that of advocating for one's instrument, and the latter will not be accomplished before the former.

The symphony orchestra repertoire is arguably the Western musical tradition's greatest contribution, but it has not, will not, and indeed cannot be the place where the tuba finds its voice as an equal instrumental partner in the contemporary musical landscape. That landscape will be shaped by a vast array of both traditional and experimental musical media, among them myriad settings to which the tuba has far more to offer than it does to the orchestra. Of course, any instrument has the most to offer to idioms which it helps to shape from the outset, and so the more tuba players who are active as creative voices rather than passive re-interpreters, the more prominent place the instrument will occupy in the future of music. Instrumental advocacy after the fact can never achieve as much.

Few would dispute that the tuba has repeatedly proven itself to offer enormous contributions to musical endeavors far different from those for which it was designed. The musicians, engineers and tinkerers whose collective efforts have yielded the modern tuba have truly created a monster, and nowhere in this essay is it insinuated that the tuba's characteristic tonal breadth makes it unsuitable for non-orchestral uses. There are, however, more and less productive ways to address this handicap, the most common of which serve only to make matters worse.

While all instrumentalists are at some point charged with exaggerating articulations and dynamics in order to overcome the limitations of their acoustical environment, the extent to which tubists are traditionally required or expected to do so is a cancer on their musical and artistic development. Band tuba playing in particular is less art than craft, and tubists are almost never allowed to trust their ears in this setting, certainly with dynamics, but also (and of more dire consequence) with regard to time. The handicap of the instrument cannot be denied, nor can the efficacy of such time-honored techniques in achieving their intended results be questioned, but given that the vast majority of tuba players receive their earliest and most extensive ensemble training in settings where such musical contortions are required of them as a matter of course (and indeed, where their necessity is a matter of wide pedagogical consensus), it is not a trivial matter that such training is useless in, if not downright counterproductive to, the development of high-level musical artistry.

Band playing is, of course, only the most egregious example; there are myriad combinations of orchestration and acoustics capable of creating severe enough discrepancies in perception between performer and listener for musical contrivances to become necessary. Experienced performers know that such situations can never be avoided 100 percent of the time, but also that performing under such circumstances is a fundamentally different experience from the ideal, and that to do so frequently is among the most frustrating and unfulfilling of lives for a musician to lead. As tubists, we must cease to accept such fate as a foregone conclusion and begin to find ways of living the truly musical life of a sound artist who works in real time; we must no longer allow ourselves to be trained to so thoroughly distrust our ears, forbidden to experience the full emotional impact of musical performance even while surrounded by a symphony of artists who would riot were such an injustice imposed on them; and we must instead find outlets in spaces, ensembles and musical styles which permit us full membership in the musicians’ club, where we can play in time as it sounds correct from our chairs rather than being conditioned to avoid doing so at all costs.

CODA: COMPLETE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO OPERATING IN THE AFFIRMATIVE

After reading everything that I have written above, some will surely see fit to remind me that the undue stereotyping of the tuba and those who play it is still a reality, that the audience most tubists (including myself) face is not merely naive but in fact harbors strong preconceptions about the instrument, and that these preconceptions are mostly negative (and also mostly false). They would raise all of this (none of which I would dispute) to ultimately argue that by abandoning instrumental advocacy for its own sake, we make a deal with the devil whereby a blind eye is turned to such injustices in exchange for the privilege to crawl under a rock and make music that no one really wants to hear but us. If such a thought is just that scary to anyone who has read this far, I offer as a substitute for the entire preceding essay a mere couple of sentences from the notes to Howard Johnson's album "Gravity!!!" which more or less make the same point:

Some people, hearing what Howard and his colleagues have created, say: "it doesn't sound like tubas." But, as Howard is quick to point out, "This is what tubas sound like. I can't account for what you've heard until now."³

Of course, Howard's band is comprised of individualists, and so one could argue that they do not, in fact, sound like any other tuba players. That is very different, however, from sounding like something they are not.

“This is what tubas sound like.” And this and this and this...

NOTES

1. Jacobs, Arnold. “The Musician Plays The Instrument.” Portrait of an Artist. CD. Summit Records, 2000.

2. Lippman, Edward A., “The Tonal Ideal of Romanticism” in The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music. University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 123-35.

3. Henthoff, Nat. “Beyond Category.” Liner notes. Gravity!!! CD. Verve Records, 1996.

A Listening Heresy

2011-05-14T14:52:00.003-07:00

A non-musician music-lover I know blurted out the other day that his experiences with live music have been uniformly awful and his experiences listening at home to recorded music much more consistently enjoyable. I suppose that as the resident "professional" musician in his social circle it was my duty at that point to go to the mat for live music, but I couldn't, and I can't. In fact, I might even in a moment of weakness utter something very similar to what he did given the opportunity.

My curmudgeonly hang-ups about acoustics and milieu will be all too familiar to regular readers, so I won't rehash them at length. To the contrary, the purpose this time around is to emphasize that the more general reason I could not in good faith take the opposing viewpoint in the discussion with my friend is because I myself am able to enjoy only a very small percentage of the music I hear in person, and that even in light of the less-than-ideal acoustical and social settings which frequently detract from said performances, this is more often than not simply because I do not enjoy the music itself, and would not enjoy it even when heard in more ideal environments. All of this is in spite of my attendance at only a small fraction of the already small number of concerts I expect, for one reason or another, to enjoy (few enough, in fact, to engender some measure of disdain on the part of a few colleagues). Were I too cave to professional obligation more often, I'd likely be even more unhappy.

There are a few different reasons why I'm tough to please, and some of them vary with the type of music or concert in question. The paradigm in classical programming tending toward a certain perfunctory breadth in style, medium and time period, it is essentially impossible for me to look forward to each piece on virtually any given program (I suspect I am hardly alone, though mine likely is the inverse of the prevailing taste among orchestra and chamber crowds). This is less of a concern in the jazz area, where sets tend to be a bit more stylistically specialized, if not in the choice of material, then certainly in the band's interpretation of it. Here, rather, it is the indispensable spontaneity of the music which is both an asset and a liability, as of course it must be; it is both a blessing and a curse that one knows less what to expect from a jazz performance than most classical ones.

Different as these considerations are, the results (i.e. my "success rate" in enjoying the music enough to feel that the expenditure of time and, usually, money was justified) are about the same, and this, I imagine you're thinking, should be a bit more troubling than I obviously find it. I'm certainly not all that troubled by it as an indication of something that might be wrong with me because it was not always this way. As a teen, when I'd barely scratched the surface of the live or recorded music available to me, I enjoyed most anything I went to; as my background grew richer, my experience more plentiful, and my perception more acute, negative reactions became more common. That they would eventually come to be the majority is, I suppose, cause for concern, whether more for me or for the scene I inhabit. Given the causes, though, it's difficult to see the situation reversing, or even standing pat. For a practitioner, refinement (especially of perception) is a necessity for artistic growth, and I continue to work at it in many areas of musical endeavor. No one should really be surprised at the consequences for one's listening habits. (If you are, you must be an arts administrator, and so I'll restate for possibly the five-thousandth time in this space that I think this dynamic greatly problematizes much music outreach which treats greater technical and perceptual sophistication as the Rosetta Stone of audience development.)

Nor would I necessarily say that I enjoy "as music" a greater percentage of the recorded music I listen to, but because I can readily repeat the experience with the good stuff, I am indeed happy more of the time. And of course, obtaining this music is cheaper and easier than traveling to a venue, the disc does not look at me sideways if I decline to order a drink (or order just one), and the experience can be aborted without offense taken or social awkwardness ensuing should its artistic futility be so immediately and conclusively apparent. Surprised to read this coming from a musician? I don't know why you would be. We're not that different from everyone else, including in that our public statements are often made purely out of fear of contradicting the company line. Most musicians would tell you that their very most powerful and lasting listening experiences were live ones, a sentiment which I would echo wholeheartedly. I think very few of us might continue on to express how exceedingly rare these experiences have been for us because we fear that doing so might expose our life's work (for most in my circles, it's live performing, not recording) as an exercise in futility. In the case of this conversation, I was not in a position to simply stop talking, but rather was confronted baldly with the assertion, and hence could not honestly disagree. To the extent I'm of a mind to change such opinions (including my own) at all, I'm far more inspired to invest in the consummation of my own live musical products (in which I am the primary variable) than I am to take time away from those endeavors to attend more of other people's gigs (the quality of which I have no control over whatsoever, and the quantity of which makes it impossible for me to make everyone happy).

Understanding

2011-05-01T22:34:00.001-07:00

I'm halfway through Peter Kivy's "Music Alone" and have therein unearthed one of my earliest philosophical fascinations (it's a pet peeve, actually), namely the far-too-great demands placed by much musicological discourse on the words "understand" and "comprehend." One of my very first efforts at writing words about music was on this subject; I was in over my head and more or less gave up, but my early intuition that the sense in which so many of us use these terms is not entirely valid (or, at the very least, not ideal) remains strong.

Schoenberg famously wrote that, "What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility," later revealing that by "comprehensibility" he more or less means "familiarity." Kivy takes a similar tack, equating the extent of musical understanding with the ability to describe the music (sounds silly when stated so baldly, but he defends it well), which is, of course, largely a matter of familiarity. To me, though, familiarity and understanding are not the same thing; there is much music with which I am intimately familiar (most of which I also heartily enjoy) that I nonetheless could not claim to truly understand in any sense of that word I'm aware of.

When pressed, a certain authority on such matters once told me that there is no philosophical consensus on what it means to understand a piece of music. Why, then, I asked, does there seem to be such broad philosophical consensus that "understand" is the right word? It has always seemed to me that we chose the word first because it sounded good, then went looking for support only after we were in too deep. The conclusion of my adolescent treatise was that musical pleasure and intellectual understanding (i.e. of anything in particular) are similar sensations arrived at by very different pathways, and that this has essentially fooled our musical culture into describing them as more or less equivalent rather than only vaguely similar. (Perhaps one even encompasses the other, but I would still argue against describing them so similarly.) I'd likely take a different path to this conclusion today, but would probably arrive there just the same. I can't help but view the concept of musical understanding as purely metaphorical and certainly less-than-ideal for the purposes of a rigorous philosophical discussion. Here's one youthful view I've not yet outgrown.

How Rockers Categorize Stuff

2011-02-12T20:31:00.002-08:00

After years of puzzled curiosity, I think I've finally figured it out:

If the music sells well, it's Rock.
This must be why so many classic Monk and Miles albums are labeled as "Rock" in digital music services' catalogs.

If the music requires at least half a brain to play, it's Jazz (or a hybrid of it).
This must be why a band like Behold...The Arctopus, in whose music one detects scarcely a hint of jazz, gets labeled as "Jazz-Metal" anyway.

In light of this realization, frequent MFEDI readers should be advised of an important change in editorial policy. Effective immediately, terms such as "Jazz-Rock Fusion" will no longer refer to the groove-driven, increasingly amplified stylistic mash-up pioneered by many prominent American and European instrumentalists of the late 1960's and early 1970's, but rather to a tiny group of works which meet the criteria for both styles as laid out above (that is, to "Kind of Blue" and Gorecki's Third Symphony). We apologize for any confusion.

Second Loves (iii)

2011-01-23T21:44:00.003-08:00

As a college student, I lost track of how many times I heard or overheard classmates assailing professors for being smart, as in:

"He's so full of himself."
"He just loves the sound of his own voice."
"He thinks he's the smartest person in the world."

...and occasionally, though it's only peripherally related, things like:

"He's tenured, he doesn't have to do shit."

I was raised, in part, by a tenured professor, and take a certain amount of offense to this kind of thing simply by virtue of that. But since I've never, for better or worse, actually taken a class from my dad, nor even taken one in his field, I don't feel that my perspective on this sort of thing is too extensively colored by my coming from an academic family. My professors were all unrelated to me and all taught other subjects, and for the most part, they were brilliant people. Even in the exceedingly rare cases where I developed an irreconcilable personal or philosophical difference with one of them, I always felt and continue to feel fortunate to have been exposed to their perspectives and knowledge.

In my experience, it's not a myth that students now tend to be more concerned with winning the game of college than they are with actual learning. I watched classmates grovel and haggle more like they were buying a used car than discussing a test question, and they almost always won. They were casual and distant when it came to studying, but utterly relentless when they detected the smallest vulnerability in the instructor, and if they thought they could get a test question thrown out, an extra day to study, or a class canceled, they fought to the bitter end. It was the path of least resistance towards a respectable grade, and the fact that it didn't pass through much of anywhere that would make them better musicians, scholars or people was no deterrent. The profs who held their ground on these matters who were the first to be accused of thinking that they're better than the rest of us, but I can honestly say that I never once found myself thinking that about a professor of mine. Even the tiny minority of them who somehow managed to thoroughly lose my respect never did it by actively making me feel inferior.

All of this is a mere prelude to what I really want to discuss here, which is the one instance in which a professor's expansive knowledge truly alienated me (by an entirely different mechanism), yet in doing so laid the groundwork for a constructive shift in priorities that is just now coming to fruition. The fact that this musicologist seemed to know an incredible amount made me very uneasy, but for an entirely different reason than my classmates: he'd done nothing notable as a performer or composer, nor was he, to my knowledge, actively involved in either craft at that time, though I believe he had been as a young man. To me as an undergraduate performance major, the purpose of gathering knowledge was to turn around and produce something out of it; one could never know too much, yet one most certainly could fail to produce music of a value commensurate with their booksmarts, the gatherer's later inability to synthesize these ideas into something tangible thus rendering the gathering itself a terrible waste of time. The realm of so-called "tangible" products included performances, scores and recordings; teaching, which even at that age I never thought myself above, I didn't see as belonging in this category. You certainly could argue that it does, but that point was moot to me at that time; I was so infatuated with playing and writing that I couldn't understand why anyone who was even mildly capable of them would voluntarily give them up, especially someone with such a vast intellect as to be capable of making contributions to the practice that simply can't be made any other way.

Having long since grown frustrated with my classmates' collective groveling, it troubled me that my own worldview had suddenly provided a seemingly rational justification for holding a professor of mine in contempt just for being really smart. I wasn't a tuba jock and didn't want to be one, but playing was still the center of my universe, and coming into close contact with someone whose sheer quantity of knowledge seemed wholly unattainable as a mere side project to my playing endeavors forced me to think long-term about my musical priorities in a way that I hadn't before. How would I ever manage to study all the scores, recordings, philosophy, musicology, theory, history, math, computers, biology, physics and visual art that might constructively inform my work without also divesting myself of the very practice and writing time needed to actually realize it? More recently, the crisis has become: What if I committed the opposite crime as him, investing too much time in producing stuff and not enough in study and preparation, thus yielding a large body of mediocre, naive, unsophisticated work?

Again, let me be clear that when I say this professor alienated me, it wasn't simply because he forced me to question myself, uncomfortable as it was. I knew in my heart of hearts even then that all of this was worth wrestling with and not worth putting off. Rather, the alienation I speak of was my judging him negatively for not putting his knowledge to what I considered to be good, i.e. productive use (a problematic and distinctively youthful perspective to be sure, but not one I would wholly disavow either). I've taken the time to relate all of this here because it has been only within the last year or so that the minor personal crisis which began years ago in this professor's class has begun to resolve itself (albeit by shattering into several mini-crises at once).

This has been a twofold process: it started with the first conclusive realization that I was indeed headed down the very abyss I feared I might be, namely that of lofty musical aspirations built on shoddy intellectual foundations; and it continues as an odd and sudden, almost unrelated desire for knowledge for its own sake which I'm at something of a loss to explain (this being a blog, though, I do attempt a partial explanation below). It certainly is a relief to resolve years of tension between the part of me that saw this prof as a navel gazer and that which saw him as a genius; ironically, though, it's because the intervening years have made me much more insecure, not less. I've found myself particularly anxious over social situations where my lack of knowledge of something musical might be exposed. It's another interesting consequence of the twentysomething years that as you progress through them, people get noticeably less and less kind about hipping you to music and musicians they think you should know about, even people who are close to you in age and/or spirit. There's a downright meanness to it these days that teachers seldom use with students, nor parents with children. So while I now probably know three times what I did as a college student, suddenly it seems never to be good enough to satisfy all the specialists that I, the voyeuristic generalist, insist on working with, and so in addition to constructively spurring on the great knowledge gathering expedition that has been my late twenties (the same one I should have begun in my teens but, like most of us, simply wasn't grown-up or fully-formed enough to initiate), I now have to admit that it has slowly been making me mean and insecure too, and that this meanness and insecurity is feeding my sudden motivation to study as strongly as any of the more practical or altruistic reasons are. Apparently, the well-worn saying ought to be amended to read, "The more people you know, the more stuff you don't know." It's the worst reason I can think of to hit the books, but I'm generally content to take what I can get in the self-motivation department.

Second Loves (ii)

2011-01-04T19:24:00.003-08:00

Hip-hop is the area of popular music (lower case, broadly construed) that has always piqued my interest disproportionately from all the others. Nailing down what exactly it is that I like about hip-hop and putting those impressions into words carries with it the same myriad pitfalls that accompany that task elsewhere in music, not the least of which is that the term "hip-hop" is general enough to include quite a bit of music I couldn't care less about. The best I can do, I think, is to say that I really like the "time feel" of certain rappers, and that when it serves the words particularly well, I like it even more. Most hip-hop songs, like most vocal jazz, classical art songs, and operas, fall well short of this exalted status, but very occasionally, I hear one that "works" on both levels, and it's threatening to become more than a passing fancy.

Yet I'm at a time in my life and career when even a dabbling side project in hip-hop doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Some colleagues would never speak to me again, others would just chuckle under their breath, and only if I'm lucky would a handful of sympathetic ones actually get my angle on it. But before the social consequences can even be considered, there's the more pressing issue of what to do about the music I've already devoted myself to, which is already an overcommitment and certainly doesn't need a mid-stream transition to a largely foreign style competing with it for time and attention. One solution is to skip the dirty work and simply launch into this new territory with little historical, technical or social perspective on it; everyone knows that's a recipe for disaster, though.

As I ruminate on whether or not to act on any of these impulses, here they are organized quite roughly into four musico-technical areas and given as something of a manifesto, a glimpse of what I might attempt in this realm if the stars were ever to align:

Part 1: Structure
Common-practice hip-hop leaves the most to be desired in the area of structure, and hence, this would seem to me to be where the most fertile ground for experimentation and innovation lies (and indeed, where the need for it is beyond pressing; it's looong overdue). In every hip-hop song I want to like but can't, there's a two bar drum loop to remind me that I'm listening to a commercially packaged product, music that needs to be "memorable" in order to be validated, and where through composition is a vice which merely "distracts" listeners from the all-important text. I see no reason why through-composed hip-hop is any less tenable than through-composed jazz of the kind that Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and others have made their names with, or for that matter, why the surface elements of a Kurt Elling vocalese couldn't serve as a model for what forward-thinking rappers might fill these new and exciting structures up with.

In other words, someone needs to do for hip-hop what Behold...The Arctopus has done for metal: combine the timbres and time-feels of a pop music style with classical-modernist approaches to tonality, structure and motivic development. Of course, the mainstream pop lemmings have branded Behold... as "the worst band in the world," and one can imagine the mainstream hip-hop crowd reacting similarly to what I'm imagining. This music would be doomed to the kind of narrow appeal that keeps Kyle Gann up at night, but I would stand by my argument that pursuing such directions is both more necessary and more ethically defensible than musical sycophancy.

I shouldn't speak in hypotheticals. I think it's highly unlikely that no one has tried this yet; it's more likely that I just don't know where to find them. (Anyone out there know?) Genre searches on sites like MySpace, CDBaby and eMusic are either not specific enough, or downright misleading. I googled "progressive hip hop" and learned that using *4-bar* drum loops, a few "live" instruments, and making passing references to politics is all it takes to be worthy of that label. No thanks.

Part 2: Materials
As with structure, it's essential that the progressive hip-hop I'm envisioning cast a far wider melodic, harmonic and rhythmic net than today's commercial hip-hop does. A mentor of mine in the jazz area has always been fond of saying that a rhythm section's comping should be interesting enough to listen to on its own without necessarily intruding on what the soloist is trying to do. I can't think of a better admonition in this discussion either, and I think anyone who remembers cassettes with the complete rap song on one side and just the beat on the other will agree that those B sides were a lot less fun to just sit around and listen to than they were to horse around with. Yes, I realize that this is part and parcel of what hip-hop is; I am more concerned, though, with what it might be able to become, which is a hell of a lot more than bashing people over the head with the same sample literally hundreds of times in the span of only a few minutes.

Part 3: Content
I'm sick and tired of reading about how modern classical music, jazz, improvised music, and whatever else the musical populists out there might decide to tar with the modernist brush if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, are irrelevant because they're too "self-referrential." CHEE-RIST, have any of you sycophants listened to hip-hop lately? If you do, you'll hear a music that literally refers to itself constantly, sung by people who simply cannot stop talking about themselves (and they don't have much to say, either). This is first order self-indulgent "fanservice" if I ever heard it, except the get-out-of-jail-free card otherwise known as the *backbeat* is redeemable for a free pass with any Cultural Studies major that might happen to hear it. So much for the words being more important than the music.

To their credit, at least hip-hop artists can be counted on to venture beyond "Ooh yeah, baby, I love you" with greater regularity than most any other vocal music tradition, popular or classical. Poetry as an art form typically does less than nothing for me, but even so, I'd have to rank the lyrical sophistication of hip-hop pretty high on the list of human cultural accomplishments. There are vast untapped possibilities, though, particularly in the realms of abstraction, nonsense, Dadaism, and scatting. Again, it's a matter of isolating particular elements of timbre and time-feel and importing them to other tonal and structural contexts. And on the rare occasion anyone comes up with a story worth telling to music, that's cool too. It had better be good, though, and if you're the main character, you better have accomplished something besides screwing or shooting somebody, because we've already heard that one a few hundred thousand times.

Part 4: Improvisation
One day about 5 years ago, pretty soon after I had graduated from college, I decided to indulge my curiosity by trying to teach myself to freestyle rap. The idea was as ridiculous then as it is now, but I felt like I had to try, if for no other reason than to gain an appreciation for people who can really do it. Along with hitting a golf ball straight and sight-reading Nick Zielinski's tunes, it's one of the hardest things I've attempted in my life, and predictably, I lost interest within a few weeks. There were a couple of moments of beginners luck, though, where, in the privacy of my car or my bedroom, I rattled off some pretty sick shit, and while I had no illusions that I'd be able to do it consistently without years of practice, there was something addictive about it, something I've never gotten over despite the fact that the sheer oppressive difficulty of it the other 99% of the time was more than enough to scare me away from making any kind of commitment to it. It was obvious that this commitment would preclude the commitments I'd already made to other musical endeavors, and while I've always been a bit restless, blowing everything up and starting over didn't seem all that prescient, especially for something which neither my inherited nor my acquired traits seem to suit me particularly well for.

Even so, I feel like my theory that one could reasonably expect to be able to approach freestyling much the same way instrumental jazz players approach their art is one worth hanging on to. The idea still intrigues me even though I didn't pursue it nearly far enough to be able to validate or refute it conclusively. I did get as far as identifying words whose final syllables were particularly tricky to rhyme and making lists of possible solutions. The harder work of transcribing other songs and perfecting the timing and delivery I didn't have the patience for, and would have been too embarrassed to be heard attempting had anyone walked in. So, I won't be the one to break down the barriers in this area myself, but if I ever meet someone else who can, I'll be champing at the bit to be their musical director.

People who would know better than I do have told me that most rappers can't actually freestyle, and that 99.9% of everything we hear from them is preconceived. That doesn't surprise me if it's true, but I do find it very disappointing. I'd posit that just as listening to Supersax performing a transcribed Charlie Parker solo or a dixieland band playing from a published arrangement are poor substitutes for the real thing, preconceived rapping, while some of it is good, merely scratches the surface of what is musically possible for the genre. The half-assedness of my experiment notwithstanding, I'm willing to bet that by applying some tried-and-true principles from the teaching of other improvisational arts, one could bring about greater overall fluency in freestyle rap, though undoubtedly it would come with the same drawbacks that have surfaced in formalized jazz education (and indeed, they're already giving degrees in Hip-Hop Studies, so we're likely to start experiencing these drawbacks sometime soon if we haven't already).

Second Loves (i)

2010-12-26T17:36:00.002-08:00

In college, I attended a masterclass by a very talented and increasingly well-known trumpet player not much older than I am now who had been a jazz major at a prominent U.S. conservatory, and who uttered something that will be with me forever: "When I finished college, I realized that I didn't really like jazz." Indeed, it could justifiably be called into question whether the music that was performed during this residency qualified as "Jazz" with a capital-J, yet this music was, besides being incredible, nevertheless inconceivable without its basis in jazz-conservatory training (not to mention being exceptionally fresh, and miraculously so, I guess, given that such training is often assailed for its potential to educate the individuality right out of its students).

This was an odd pose he was striking, disavowing jazz one moment while displaying an unabashed indebtedness to it the next (he might contend the accuracy of the latter description, but it was hard not to hear it that way, and this not in spite of how he prefaced his work but in fact most especially because of it). It's a pose that doesn't resonate with me any more today than it did back then, but having since navigated the post-college twenty-something years myself, I can at least say that I better understand the dynamics at play. I was barely 21 years old at the time of that masterclass, but my honeymoon period with bebop had already evaporated, leaving me bouncing between intense periods of study borne of fanatical devotion and despondent periods of non-study following an event or series of events which brought home to me just how stylistically limited an improvisor I had chosen to become. In the meantime, I was already noticing that while there were tons of other college-aged jazz players, tons of middle-aged jazz players, and more than a few senior citizen jazz players, I didn't ever seem to meet very many twenty-something jazz players. I only knew a few musicians who were 5 to 10 years older than I was, and like this clinician, most of them seemed to be after something eclectic which may or may not have entailed an overt jazz influence. Among this group, most were at peace with their past jazz study, but it wasn't unheard of to meet one who had disavowed it altogether as an adolescent phase. This wasn't a novel concept to me at this point; I just wasn't prepared to encounter it in the form a high-profile professional giving a university masterclass.

I'm now approaching the age this clinician was when those words were spoken, and a lot still has to change if I am ever to decide that I "don't really like jazz." Nonetheless, I say that his statement will be with me forever because it was the moment I realized that it's not just broken-down jazz-wannabe punk rock stoners with outsized inferiority complexes that say these kinds of things; they have, do, and will, but it can be soft-spoken, well-educated, profoundly gifted musicians as well, musicians who make music I would actually want to listen to, whether it's jazz or not, and who I might on a good day even be able to tolerate socializing with. That was something of a revelation, both for better and for worse.

Though I haven't disavowed jazz (or most any other music I've ever been smitten with for that matter), I have, in fact, gradually begun acquiring interests from outside classical music and jazz, interests which may be tremendously dissimilar to these styles on the surface, but which invariably contain deeper similarities. And having now more or less arrived at the dreaded age in question myself, I'm no longer limited to observing snapshots, but now have also witnessed trajectories, the before, during and after of it, as well as the litany of extra-musical priorities peculiar to this age that can, in some cases at least, drive the musical ones over a cliff.

I've frequently remarked to others that this is an age where musicians go one of two directions (leaving aside for a moment the dreaded third direction of quitting altogether), namely towards either lifelong learning or a lifetime of stagnation. By far the most insidious enabler of apathy is the incredible tolerance (enforcement?) of mediocrity that prevails at just about every turn among so-called professionals. A young freelancer can't help but notice how much lower the musical bar is at "money gigs" compared to even a second-rate college music department. Another is the frantic twenty-something race to petite bourgeousie domestic respectability, pitting canoe ownership against studio rental and wine tasting against score study in the high-stakes court of spousal approval.

Among those twenty-something musicians who, for whatever reason, continue to seek growth, a certain expansion of purview is almost inevitable. Yet a severe disconnect continues to exist between myself and many of those around me by virtue of the fact that, whereas I started with classical music and jazz and have been working my way out from there, most of them worked their ways to classical music and jazz from somewhere else. I say "continues to exist" because this was the source of even greater frustration when I was in high school and college. I used to entertain myself at jazz camps by picking out the students who came to jazz through rock just by hearing them (though hearing them was, of course, often superfluous as they usually were dressed for the occasion). Any given jazz jam I might have found myself at during those years seemed to follow roughly the same trajectory: a series of awkwardly played (sometimes awkwardly called) standards would prevail until some ballsy kid in a Green Day shirt had the guile to call "Chameleon," to which "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" was the inevitable chaser, and suddenly everyone except for the faculty and I was having the time of their lives. Some of the people I work with now have seen me refuse to play "Chameleon." It's not so much that I dislike the music as that its symbolic status as the pivot tune in the jazz-rock cold war that defined my musical youth has more or less spoiled it for me for all time. (I have performed "Red Clay," though, because if you really want to be a dick, you can always insist on playing it in the original key.)

Suffice it to say, then, that when disavowal time rolled around, circa age 24, there were some surprises among my peers, but not many. There's selling out, and then are those who never had anything for sale in the first place. Once whatever social factor it was that compelled all those high school punk rockers to go to jazz camp every summer had evaporated, they gave up trying to infiltrate the jazz world for status' sake and went back to being who they really were (which I don't begrudge them one bit because it's better for all concerned in the long run). This is most definitely not the route that our mystery clinician took; I imagine he falls firmly into the group that simply continued discovering non-jazz music he liked rather than that which divests itself of all things uncool at the drop of a hat. It should be obvious to anyone who keeps up with these missives that I'm a jazzhead at heart, but recent years have presented (if not manifested) the possibility of going eclectic in ways I never anticipated. That this has been brought about by exposure to what is, in the grand scheme of things, an exceedingly tiny fraction of the non-jazz, non-classical music that's out there only adds to my suspicion that a more eclectic route is inevitable.

Sounds simple, but it's not. For one thing, there's a fine line between studied eclecticism and merely indulging a short attention span, this being the difference between true synthesis and mere reference or allusion. For another, there's the issue of authenticity, or bringing one's depth of knowledge of and experience in newfound musical interests up to speed with lifelong ones. Finally, much as it pains me to say it, there's the social aspect of all of this, and the reality that whether one's change of stylistic direction is studied or unstudied, unified or fragmented, authentic or allusive, sincere or calculated, assumptions will be made based on limited evidence, and otherwise sympathetic peers on both sides of the divide will think to themselves either, "He's no longer one of us," or "He'll never really be one of us." Even to someone like me, that can be a more powerful deterrent than the specter of taking time away from prior musical engagements, though the latter also poses an interesting conundrum.

Success, Of A Sort

2010-11-30T19:03:00.001-08:00

Given a project rife with contradictions, it's fitting that this edition of it has both affirmed and negated the well-worn saying about third efforts. With today's posting, I have for the first time succeeded in posting at least once daily for an entire month, as well as set a new personal record for posts in a month with 32. Nonetheless, this has been by far the least satisfying of the first three iterations of Blog Month. That comments have remained scarce is, of course, always a disappointment, but there's more to it than that this time.

Last year, while I started slowly, by the end of the month, I couldn't wait to get home to write. I had almost enough to say and enough time to polish it to be able to justify posting daily under the standards I try to hold myself to the rest of the year. Whatever I was reading, playing and experiencing elsewhere during that time must have been unusually inspiring or thought-provoking. I've felt inspired this month for a variety of reasons, but I've also been awfully busy. I knew that there was to be no slow month this fall, and so I tried to pick the most conducive one, but it was bound to be less than ideal either way. I frequently made room for this most trivial of projects by tabling other more vital ones in hopes that a relapse of last year's bout of inspiration might justify doing so. For the most part, it wasn't to be, and there were several days this month where I struggled to come up with something, anything to post. Notably, though, there were no days where I simply forgot to post, which is one improvement over last year. I think that bodes well for future projects, and I plan on continuing with them. But only once a year. At the most.

Per tradition, the entire opus will remain on the front page for the next several weeks. Savor it slowly, or all at once, but don't expect more of this type of material until next fall.

2010-11-29T21:37:00.000-08:00

2010-11-28T09:59:00.004-08:00

The Network

2010-11-27T20:29:00.002-08:00

Readers could be forgiven for detecting a contradiction between something I wrote yesterday and a previous post on social networking and music, so I thought I'd offer a clarification. When I "tour" MySpace these days, I'm looking for networks of music, not networks of people. It's great to be able to play the age-old game of working your way out from music you already know and love by checking out those musicians' other projects. That's initially how I went about building my CD collection, and it's equally effective (not to mention free) in the context of MySpace. There is, in fact, a certain amount of professional obligation at play here, but I consider that aspect of it to be subservient to my curiosity as a listener and a general desire to discover new music.

What led me in a previous post to trash social networking in the context of music distribution is the idea of discovering new music through one's friends. At least that's how many sites have phrased it; I'd call it herd mentality. I suspect that this idea of social music discovery is one way these sites seek to deal with the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of a vastly oversaturated music scene. I for one enjoy the hunt, though, and don't find it as intimidating as some might; again, if you can manage to stumble on just one band you like, suddenly you have a thread, and you might never exhaust it. Daunting as this is in some ways, I find the idea of being spoon-fed my musical diet by some invisible hand to be the least palatable of all the options.

Wolpe's Symphony

2010-11-26T16:48:00.003-08:00

With all the talk about digital music services around here lately, it's important to remember that YouTube remains an incredible resource for musicians despite the legal and ethical gray areas it operates in. I for one like to balance my legal acquisition of in-print compact discs and MP3 files with periodic tours of YouTube and MySpace, and I usually come away with a new name or sound that piques my interest. I recently searched for the composer Stefan Wolpe on YouTube and discovered his Symphony of 1956, which has since come to fascinate me, this despite my later discovery of its low standing even among Wolpe fans.

Let's start with some background from the Stefan Wolpe society:

During the 1950s...Wolpe was seeking a way through classical twelve-tone and developing variation into a new constellatory form. While director of music at Black Mountain College (1952-6), Wolpe had the time and the seclusion to compose a series of scores that mark the high point of abstract expressionism: Enactments for Three Pianos (1953), Piece for Oboe, Cello, Percussion, and Piano (1955), and his Symphony (1956). In these works he said that he aimed for "a very mobile polyphony in which the partials of the sound behave like river currents and a greater orbit-spreadout is guaranteed to the sound, a greater circulatory agility (a greater momentum too)." Rather than a single center of attention, he sought to create multiple centers, "to give the sound a wealth of focal points with numerous different directory tendencies." To obtain a more open sound he further fragmented and superimposed derivatives of the shapes: "To keep the sound open, that openness which leads me to think in layers (like the cubists), often I use canonic (or double canonic) foldings to keep the sound as porous as possible. I use then all possible techniques of inversions, retrogrades, like attacking an object from all sides, or moving out from all sides of an object."

If such lofty pre-compositional scheming would seem to doom such a piece from the start, think again. To my ears, any of these metaphorical allusions to "river currents," "orbit-spreadout," "circulatory agility," "multiple centers," "a wealth of focal points," "layers," "foldings," and "attacking an object from all sides," is as good as any other in describing what I find so great about his Symphony. (I just wish I spoke German so I could comprehend the true meaning of whatever untranslatable term got translated as "orbit-spreadout." The translation might find its way into my vocabulary nonetheless; it's just that good on its own.) The propulsive energy of this piece approaches an improvised quality, yet with audible unity in pitch selection and manipulation that one would be hard-pressed to improvise.

In digging around for information about Wolpe, I eventually stumbled on a peculiar recollection from Elliott Carter:

His music is terribly uneven, but some of it is remarkable. What it always has is one thing you like to have in music, and that is a kind of personal enthusiasm. It's always very lively, you feel it's always in touch with life. It isn't routine. It's unexpected in many ways. There are all sorts of different kinds of things that he tries to integrate into one thing, which sometimes don't go together so well in one piece, but in others they do. The whole question of the relation of the diatonic to twelve-tone or chromaticism, the combination of those is something he fought with. Sometimes he solved it, and sometimes he didn't, as in the Symphony. It seems to me to be extremely odd that a man as experienced as he should have written a piece that is so difficult for the orchestra that it is nearly impossible to get a good performance. It may have been as a result of his contact with musicians in Europe, since he went to Darmstadt in its early days, when composers were writing very advanced and very difficult pieces.

Uh, hello? Elliott Carter talking shit about someone else's "very advanced and very difficult" piece of which "it is nearly impossible to get a good performance"? Something stinks here. I think the "relation of the diatonic to twelve-tone" is a somewhat more valid criticism, but I think he overstates it. Forgive the idealism, but I dream of a day when there is no longer a simple dichotomy between tonality and atonality, consonance and dissonance, tension and release, or whatever. Modern musicians have been working toward this for over a century and it has not yet come to fruition, but I hold out hope. More importantly, though, the converted can always decide to go along ahead of the lemmings and proceed this way ourselves as best we can. It's difficult and not totally attainable given the world we live in, but we can try. And I'm not saying I had to try to like Wolpe's Symphony, because I didn't; I loved it the first time I heard it. But, there certainly are moments here (isolated ones, really) that threaten to sound incongruous to the rest of the piece by virtue of lending themselves to a tonal hearing. I can hear them that way, but I can also hear them as inevitable manifestations of the inner logic of the piece, and to me, that trumps everything. Our conditioning really can get in the way of enjoying this kind of music, especially if it has been very traditional or conservative. Just do me a favor and try not to be like that, okay?

Kyle Gann is an avowed Wolpe fan and Carter detractor who has nonetheless opined that, "Wolpe's Symphony is one of his weakest works." Here are two eminent musical thinkers whose work and ideas are at odds in most every respect except for their interest in Wolpe, and they're both unimpressed by the Symphony. I beg to differ, but thanks to the YouToobz, you can make your mind up for yourself. I've embedded the entire piece below. No one's ever accused me of being an audiophile, and I actually tremendously enjoy the various imperfections of this rendition, from the slightly scratchy sound quality to the obvious struggles of some of the players to execute exceedingly difficult passages. Whereas Carter complains that it's almost impossible to get a good performance of this piece, I have to wonder if it isn't the mark of a truly great piece that it can tolerate a certain amount of abuse. In any case, I'm imagining what a cleaner rendition would sound like and I'm not at all sure I'd prefer it.

If you navigate to the actual YouTube page for each of these videos, you'll find that, predictably, the number of views declines as you progress through the movements. Too bad; the piece gets better as it goes along. Of course, I expect everyone to listen to all four or you're not allowed to read my blog anymore.

Other Aspects of the Art

2010-11-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

In my rush to keep the dream alive, I omitted two important considerations from yesterday's discussion. The first is spontaneity. These pieces are essentially improvisations, albeit within severe enough constraints that the variations among them are of the subtle variety. Even so, this is an important parallel with my musical endeavors. I sense similar faculties at work and similar sensations present during the creation of these pieces as I do while improvising musically, and both acts take more out of me mentally than they do physically. That the sketches would take anything out of me is odd, since they only take about 20 minutes to make, but the "endgame" so to speak is always a bit suspenseful, and I sometimes even feel the slightest bit nervous as it approaches. I don't stop, though; working from start to finish without the opportunity for revision is an important part of the process. Perhaps I should start calling them "improvisations." I do hate titles, though.

As you could have guessed from the above points, the second consideration is temporality. While ultimately I intend the completed works to be observed statically, I think it would be interesting to "perform" them. There would have to be some technology involved, but it could be done: you would need some kind of touch screen beneath the paper to detect the sketches as they're made, and a projector to bring the show to an audience. A "virtuoso" could sketch with both hands at once, beginning the pattern at opposite ends of the paper and moving toward the center. I imagine that the idea of an audience sitting silently in a room watching a monitor would meet the same criticism that abstract symphonic music meets these days; I would say the same thing in response.

I Write Draw for Myself

2010-11-24T21:28:00.003-08:00

The art I posted yesterday is the fourth such piece I've created. It's a bit juvenile, and that's part of the point. When I was a kid, this was the form that my doodles always seemed inclined to take, a series of straight (or almost straight) lines connected (or not) to infinity. I detested music as a child, but was very interested in drawing. Representational drawing defied my abilities, however, this despite a near fixation on the subject for a time, and a few separate attempts at seeking formal instruction. Had I the slightest inclination towards abstraction at that young age, I may have spent my life creating these monochrome sketches rather than composing music, but for better or worse, like most young kids, my interest in the arts was always driven in some way or another by the entertainment industry, and as we all know, abstraction doesn't sell.

To be sure, I'm worse than a dilettante when it comes to visual art, but that's also part of the reason I thought it might be worth sitting down to draw again. With so much handwringing, here and everywhere else, about the differences between initiates and non-initiates when it comes to modern music, I started to wonder if this might not be a good way to more truly put myself in the shoes of a naive musician. Additionally, when I started considering the implications that much of my musical philosophy might have in the visual realm, I realized that this silly childhood scribbling actually reflects that quite well. I had "found my voice," so to speak, as an artist long before I would as a musician, probably because the technical demands of my musical voice are enormous compared to the minimal ones required by the art I posted yesterday. This mystifies me a bit, though. While a high degree of abstraction and a minimum of discernible sequences or patterns are indeed two features I value highly in a piece of music, there are other facets of my art that are severely at odds with my musical value system, the most obvious being the severe economy of means.

Musical minimalism greatly intrigues me conceptually and philosophically, but as a listener, I generally don't care much for the results. Conversely, I remember encountering Donald Judd's concrete work as a teen and being fascinated by it without having a clue why. I still am, and I still don't know why; it's tempting to conclude, as many would, that this is a predictable case of training influencing reception, but I think if you presented me with the Ferneyhough of visual art, I'd probably like that too. (Actually, that sounds awesome; anyone know who that might be?) I'm also a stylistically restless musician, whereas I can't imagine being comfortable working in any visual medium other than these sketches. That conflict intrigues me as well.

I hope to use these works as cover art on some future releases, and may post some more here. However, I've seen too many faux-musicians trying to pass off their own juvenilia as some kind of earth-shattering aesthetic triumph, and I certainly don't want to come off that way. Let's just say that I ~~write~~ draw for myself, not as a gesture of contempt, but one of respect.

Art

2010-11-23T15:19:00.001-08:00

Album Only

2010-11-22T12:11:00.003-08:00

I generally want complete albums, but in rare cases, I might be after a particular track. I often wonder if all of us aren't after those same tracks, because they more often than not tend to be the very same ones that are Album Only.

More than once over the past several years, I've tried to figure out how to purchase a Stanley Turrentine version of "Sugar," a tune that I often teach to my students; more than once, I have found this tune to be Album Only everywhere I knew to look (though I haven't looked recently, so who knows). It was often the only such track, even if it wasn't over 10 minutes. You think someone knows what's up?

If the damn things are so precious, charge a dollar more. Charge two dollars more for all I care. I would pay $2.99 for a track, but not $5.99, and I don't want to waste time, bandwidth and disk space on shit I don't want. The sites/labels think they'll make a few extra bucks this way, but I wonder how many sales they lose entirely?

Fwiw, iLike.com seems to have the fewest Album Only restrictions of any place I've looked. I was able to buy a nearly 13 minute track that is Album Only everywhere else for $1.89, saving several dollars (and mins. and kbps and MBs) over what the whole album would have cost. This inspired me to investigate further and discover that you can get away with all kinds of things at this site. For example, there's a version of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, a piece whose outer movements are each nearly a half-hour long while the middle movement is considerably shorter, where each of the three tracks can be purchased individually for $0.99. Also, the two lengthy tracks of Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" are Album Only, but the album itself only costs $1.99. Compare that to $7.79 at emusic and $10.99 (!) at Rhapsody. iLike is, unfortunately, now owned by MySpace. I won't take back anything I said yesterday about social networking, but damn...either they're able to use their market share as leverage in negotiations, or they're getting away with something serious.

Digital Music and the Greater Lemming Community

2010-11-21T17:24:00.002-08:00

When it comes to digital music services, there's a pet peeve of mine that even Lala could stand to be scolded for: the social networking component. If there's any value whatsoever in keeping apprised of what everyone else is listening to, it's to be able to avoid listening to it yourself. One can certainly use the information that way, but I suspect that's not how it was intended to work:

eMusic is about the love of music. Based on your listening preferences we take you to great new music as well as tell the story behind the classics. We unearth forgotten gems, make connections that lead you to new music and make the music you already love a little richer. Call it a curated approach. eMusic is perfect for people who love music but don't have 20 hours a week to stay on top of what's going on. We make sense of it all so you can find and enjoy the music you love.

It takes a hell of a lot more than 20 hours a week folks. Get over it. No one can truly "keep up" anymore, including you. Keeping up isn't the point anyway, unless you already know everything about all the music that was made before you were born. This conceit of a third party distilling the cumulative musical ferment of society down to the "right" two albums a month is not only impractical, but a little scary. I don't care how "indie" you are, if you're in business, I don't trust you to do a better job digging up new music than I can, and I certainly don't need a profile page so that the other lemmings can cop my shit.

Even being something of a modernist curmudgeon, I still tend to end up with an assortment of music in my collection that defies collaborative filtering as it is currently constituted, or at least it would seem this way since the "people who bought this also bought..." lists never seem to contain anything I would touch with a virtual ten foot pole. Based on the generally more eclectic tastes of most of my acquaintances, I have to think that it's probably even worse for them. So while I can't avoid unwittingly contributing to the lists that pop up on other people's screens, I won't be filling out my emusic profile and I won't be viewing anybody else's. If you really care what me, myself and I are listening to, you'll have to ask.

The 3 Tiers of Digital Music Bliss (R.I.P.)

2010-11-20T14:10:00.003-08:00

It occurred to me after writing last night's entry that this is the simplest way to sum up what was so great about Lala. I imagine that most of us could put over 90% of our purchased music into 3 categories:

Tier 1 - We'll be listening to it again.

Tier 2 - We're glad to have heard it, but don't need to hear it again.

Tier 3 - We wish we'd never heard it, or at least spent money to hear it.

Lala is the only service I've yet encountered whose format seemed to take into account that this is a 3-tiered system, not a 2-tiered one (i.e. take it or leave it). First and foremost, because you could listen once to the entire track for free, you never had to purchase anything wondering what the rest of it sounded like. Buying music based on samples is like buying a house having only been shown one room. This is especially true outside the realm of pop, and most especially in classical music, where listening to 30 seconds often tells you little more about a 3 minute piece than it does about a 60 minute one.

Next, if you wanted to hear the piece again, you didn't necessarily have to pony up $0.89 per track, or several dollars per album, but rather could buy streaming access for a matter of cents. This was the most unique aspect of Lala: a recognition of the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2. Traditional services, meanwhile, are stuck dealing in black and white. With a download-only service like emusic, you're simply stuck with your choices, while with streaming-only services like Rhapsody, you have to make an additional purchase in order to download the files. A commenter suggests Zune Pass for PC users, and their service is indeed appealing as it includes both streaming access and a few downloads each month. You still have to sign up (i.e. pay) to stream anything more than samples, though, and in this respect, Lala's one free listen policy was still far superior.

Finally, if a track or album continued to grow on you through repeated online listening and you simply had to have the file, you could take the plunge and buy it, often for a dollar or so less per album than iTunes. Conversely, if you got what you could out of a track and didn't really feel the need to hear it again, you could breathe easy having only paid a few cents to stream it. If any other service can find a similar way to ensure that listeners never buy music they don't want, I have to think that customers will flock to that service. Of course, I'm sure all that wasted money adds up to a healthy profit for the current players in this market, but Lala seemed to be doing fine without it; $80,000,000 fine according to Apple.

Subscription

2010-11-19T17:51:00.003-08:00

As of last night, I am now an emusic subscriber. I've generally been dragging my feet in transitioning over to digital music acquisition (as opposed to physical media), but if for no other reason, the sheer ease of it is slowly winning me over, even though I do miss tending to my CD shelf. This particular foray, though, is the rather direct result of Apple shutting down Lala. Like many, I was incensed and vowed never to purchase anything from iTunes again (also like many, I doubt very much that I have purchased my last Apple computer; they've still got me by the balls, but I'm making the gesture anyway, even if it's a drop in the bucket compared to what I paid for this MacBook).

eMusic is nice, but like all the remaining options that I've looked into, it's inferior to Lala in some important ways. For one, you cannot preview full tracks, but instead get only very short samples. Also, while the downloads are cheaper than most any other place I've looked at, no one seems to be able to touch Lala's streaming price of just a few cents per track. By purchasing tracks or albums as "websongs," you could stream them to your heart's content. As a musician, I often end up wanting the file for music I intend to transcribe, play along with, or otherwise study closely, but even so, the fact that you could load your Lala "wallet" with the minimum payment of $5 and use it to purchase access to a dozen or so complete albums was, well, too good to be true. I don't know how on earth Lala managed to negotiate this agreement, and I worry that Apple set music distribution back a decade by trashing it, because no one else seems to offer it.

Of course, there are other services that allow unlimited streaming of their entire libraries for roughly the same monthly cost as an eMusic subscription. This is tempting, but I'm not quite ready for it. For starters, I have to be able to move around when I'm listening, usually in the form of pacing. Sitting in front of a computer is among my least favorite ways to listen, not only because I can't move, but also because it's a computer and I'll be on Yahoo Sports before the first solo is finished. Out of deference to my housemates, I rarely use the stereo, since lots of what I listen to isn't music to most people, and since they already have to listen to me practice a couple of hours a day. Once you have the files, though, they can be loaded onto an iPod (a term which is quickly taking its place among the likes of Kleenex and Xerox) and taken wherever, usually from one end of the living room to the other...repeatedly. (I prided myself forever on possibly being the last person left without an iPod; even though I finally gave in, I assume I'm still the only person who bought it with no intention of ever taking it out of the house.)

The transience of streaming in comparison to actually having the files on your hard drive does make me a bit uneasy, much more uneasy than the digital-versus-physical question that hangs up people my parents' age. Witness the Lala doomsday scenario, where everyone who had purchased streaming access to just the tunes they wanted for an incredibly good price woke up one morning to learn that in a month's time they would no longer have access to any of it. The iTunes credits we received in the amount of our websong purchases were virtually worthless considering that single track download on iTunes costs 10 times what a websong cost on Lala. Further, given the attacks on net neutrality and municipal wifi that have already been waged by big telecoms, it might not be a bad idea to have your music on a hard drive rather than in a cloud.

Teaching Docket

2010-11-18T20:57:00.002-08:00

This month and next, I am and will be teaching more than I ever have before for any significant stretch of time. But what's more remarkable, to me at least, about the present slate is its diversity. It had been a couple of years since a trombone student had signed up to study with me, but I've picked up 3 of them since the beginning of the month; my Jazz History and Listening Class at the West Bank School of Music has populated for only the second time since we began offering it; our director at WBSM wrote and received a sizable grant earlier this year to allow us to offer a series of 5-week workshops, and Milo Fine and I are leading one on Improvised Music; and two of my longer-term tuba students are auditioning to be music majors next year, the first two from my studio to have the inclination.

Rather than bogging me down, all of this sudden activity has me enjoying teaching like never before. It's rare that I've been able to be active as an educator in all of the areas in which I'm active as a performer and composer, and not surprisingly, as with those other endeavors, I'm much happier that way. It's also, of course, easier on the wallet to be teaching more. Much ink has been spilled lamenting cases where musicians were forced to teach to make a living, but I've never felt that way myself; I see at least a minimal amount of teaching as an obligation to feed the other side of the pipeline, and have a genuine desire to share what I've learned with students.

If anything, I find it unfortunate that I derive most of my income from teaching not because it gets in the way of my other pursuits, but because I'd rather not have to charge for it. In a perfect world, I would teach a handful of students, free of charge, and with high expectations (both achievement and attendance) that would have to be met in order to continue the relationship. I would just as soon teach raw beginners as aspiring pros assuming they show up every week and put the time in to make steady progress. Until that day, though, what I'm doing now through the end of the year is just about the next best thing. Variety is the spice of life.

Make-Up Calls

2010-11-17T21:01:00.002-08:00

Twins manager Ron Gardenhire has won Manager of the Year in the American League, some would say more for his managing in the early-to-mid 2000's than in 2010. If hindsight is 20/20, maybe these awards should be voted on 5 years out rather than in the days after the regular season; everyone knows Gardy should have won one by this time, but as has been pointed out, once a snub is made, the make-up call pushes the next deserving candidate back a year, and a vicious cycle ensues whereby an honor supposedly tied to a specific time span becomes more like a lifetime achievement award.

The obvious comparison to the music world would be with the Pulitzer, but that horse hath been flogged. Rather, this also makes me consider the idea of "timelessness" in music, and the implications of building a value system around it. Critical, scholarly and popular fashions are fickle things: composers' legacies are at their mercy, and make-up calls are common. In some ways, we are stuck in a perpetual state of making up for our forebears' misidentification of merit in the music of their time. (It is not just mere "hindsight" that better suits later generations to this task, but also their pronounced lack of irons in the fire so far as careers and egos are concerned.) This is inevitable but unfortunate, since we could be investing that time in fighting our own era's battles, and maybe saving the next one some of the same trouble.

Esoteric composers everywhere are castigated for admitting that they're banking on receiving posthumous acclaim, but one must remember that "timeless" music reaches more listeners over time than any of us can reach during our lives. I don't think it's such a bad mindset to have, and I'm all for make-up calls in music.

Prescriptions

2010-11-16T21:33:00.002-08:00

I've always been of a mind that prescribing repertoire for competitions, grad school auditions and other such circumstances is short sighted. One's choice of repertoire says a little bit about their technique, but a lot about their musicianship. Committees aren't ignorant of this, but rather keenly aware of it; direct comparison of players' execution of the same set of tasks is to be favored because it enables the imposition of more objective criteria in a way that isn't possible when everyone is playing different music. Personally, I don't think that's a good thing. Any conceit of objectivity in a music competition is a mirage anyway; I'd rather everyone heeded the total musical package, whatever that is to them. I know that if I ever found myself sitting on a committee where I was asked to assimilate someone else's value system, I'd certainly want to know why I was invited in the first place.

When it comes to instruments like the tuba, I wonder if committees aren't more apt to prescribe repertoire simply because there is so little of it to choose from. A tubist-composer or -arranger who creates even a merely serviceable new piece for themselves to play has stacked the deck substantially in their own favor (you'll gather from that statement that I personally consider most all of the usual suspects to be less than serviceable, if not as showcases, then as music, which is more important). On the other hand, one wonders if mediocre music is ever prescribed precisely in order to see who can make the best of it. If personalization is the goal, though, better to let everyone choose (or even create) their own music in the first place.

Revision as Conformity

2010-11-15T09:58:00.002-08:00

Earlier this month, I wrote briefly about an old tune of mine I was reworking on short notice. It was performed last night, and seemed to go over well. I wrote this composition when I was only 19, and the original version is typical of someone that age: there are strong ideas marred somewhat by some bizarre harmonies, a few of which I didn't know how to notate and had to invent chord symbols for. The revision process essentially consisted of "cleaning up" this mess, in other words, removing everything that isn't normative in a hard bop minor blues and converting a few wild chord symbols to more standard ones. I hate doing that to my tunes, whatever the style; there are enough hard bop tunes already, and those of us living today could never do it better than the style's originators anyway. It's one reason revision is not one of my strengths as a composer. As my music gets more "original," I find revision to be more palatable because I feel a greater sense of ownership over the ideas at play. But there are several early works of mine, like this one, that I've been loathe to revisit because they are clearer imitations of historical styles, and revising the non-normative elements out of them would mean depersonalizing them almost completely. Even if the result is more palatable to my current set of ears, I often sense that there was another solution which I simply was not up to finding at the time, and that I will not find now given how different I am. The stylistically normative solutions can revive a tune, but at this point, I've written better tunes in all of those styles anyway, and again, we really don't need too many more of them at this point (I don't, at least).

Of course, composers evolve with time, but those bizarre 19 year-old ideas are always with us. There was a bar or so of my arrangement for last night that I wasn't in love with, but simply couldn't see working any other way. I can recall countless instances of the same situation going back to my earliest compositional efforts, and they continue to this day. The difference is that nowadays, they often work way better than I think they will before hearing the piece played. I think it's that sense of logic that improves most of all over time in a composer, moreso even than their technique or their knowledge of other pieces. When it comes time to revise again in another 10 years, maybe I won't have to take those parts out.

Compression

2010-11-14T12:32:00.002-08:00

This is the promised follow-up to yesterday's post

In his lecture, Treasure asserts that compressed audio makes listeners tired and irritable, and that cheap headphones pose a greater risk of damaging hearing because listeners are apt to simply turn the volume up in order to compensate for the lack of clarity. I listen to a lot of compressed audio, usually on the cheapest headphones I can get, and to me, the listening environment has a lot more to do with the volume I listen at than the sound quality does. The middle of the day is the worst time for me to listen because that's when there's the most background noise, both outside and inside; morning and evening are much more conducive.

Whereas it has been observed that some people damage their hearing by continually turning the volume up throughout a listening session as their ears adjust to the new level, I find that the opposite is also possible. If things are relatively quiet, I'm able turn down the volume as the session goes along. I try to proceed this way whenever possible; it's not just healthier, but begets more focused listening. It also means that the levels at which I listen to highly compressed audio, while they may be higher, are not so much higher that I'm putting myself at risk.

All of this aside, the bit about our brains trying to imagine the missing data in a compressed file is laughable. The human brain is not capable of "sampling" at the rates of even the lossiest audio; if it was, we would actually hear the holes in the sound. And even if this was possible, it might be unpleasant, or it might not. It might be heard as a disfigurement of a great work of art, or it might be heard as a new kind of art. The truly dangerous aspect of what Treasure is putting forward is the direct attribution of various psychological effects to particular sounds in utter disregard of social and cultural context. If what he's saying is true, it would seem to preclude the very possibility of art music, most of which makes occasional (if not copious) use of the types of sounds he labels as inherently harmful. He's the first coming of the anti-Cage, if you will, and hopefully the last.

In fairness, Treasure had to squeeze his talk into an exceedingly small time frame imposed by TED; deep in the comments, he refers to, "the rather stressful experience of cramming a TED talk into 7 minutes" as an explanation for a minor omission. In this article, presumably not written under those kind of constraints, he's more rational, granting that different listeners will find different things soothing and irritating. Even so, his advice to avoid listening to too much rap and death metal because they convey anger is codgerly at best. Some people listen to these musics when they're angry precisely as a way to let it all out and get it over with quicker, which would seem to fit with the kinds of things he's advocating; but that point aside, I think it is, again, presumptuous to conclude that music which conveys anger and that which is made out of anger are necessarily the same thing, or that all listeners will necessarily perceive a nexus in the same works, whether there is one or not. And as I opined yesterday, the construction of a system for evaluating the healthiness of music based on something as subjective as the emotion it supposedly conveys is an outright dangerous idea, and invites 1984-ish dystopian visions in anyone who claims fealty to musical modernism.

An interesting test case here would be Messiaen, who often used birdsong he transcribed himself in his music, and whose sacred music could never be labeled as having been written out of anything but love; yet even so, there is much harsh dissonance in his music, and while it is clearly more accessible than many composers of the era, it still might as well be Webern to many people. I wonder if "good intentions" truly transcend style for Mr. Treasure?

The invocation of the term "schizophonia" is also bothersome. The "dog barking at the speakers" doesn't know what a speaker is or why it emits sound; it doesn't have a lifetime of social conditioning to help it understand when it's time for barking and when it's time for aesthetic contemplation; and it doesn't inherit an immaculate, centuries-old tradition of art music from its canine ancestors. One would think that the dissociation of sound from its original source is something humans are well-enough equipped to deal with, most especially if context is considered. Of course hearing a gunshot fired from behind you is scary! To compare this with listening to an iPod on a bus is completely absurd. Schizophonia is a big scary word that resembles the name of a common and devastating mental illness, yet it seems to refer to an exceedingly transient, externally imposed condition rather than a chronic, internal one (and one which is, ironically, imposed on us several times over in the TED lecture, notably by the crack that suddenly appears in the "schizophonia" graphic itself ca. 2:40; apparently it wasn't enough of a deterrent to warrant sacrificing some visual accoutrements). Besides, according to schizophonia's hilarious entry at Urban Dictionary, there's nothing to worry about.

Finally, consider that Treasure is a businessman. He has a book out. He runs a consulting firm. Some of this is so ridiculous that it almost seems like a publicity stunt. If you Google him, you'll see that it's working, as well as (frighteningly) finding some sympathetic followers. I'd otherwise be inclined to ignore it, but let's face it, if I in my very occasional sampling of only the most esoteric of music blogs managed to stumble on one of his lectures, then he's getting over. (And here I am giving him more publicity.) In any case, if you want to talk about making sound harmful, about abusing its properties, using it to manipulating people's emotions, or sullying its natural beauty, I can't think of a more distasteful use of sound than for the ends of Treasure's firm. It's an interesting pose he's striking.

Oppression

2010-11-13T18:09:00.001-08:00

I'll follow up on this tomorrow, but for now, just let this TED talk soak in and see if it doesn't make your skin crawl just a little bit:

The bit about compression causing your brain to work harder to fill in the missing data is just plain funny; the bit about music which is "made with love" being beneficial is no laughing matter, though, especially when an organization as influential as TED is giving someone a platform to state it as a scientifically proven fact. It seems that there are an awful lot of people working awfully hard to come up with just about any reason they can to prove goddammit that contemporary music is the devil's spawn. It's not hard to imagine a dystopian society where such "scientific" evidence is wielded as a McCarthyistic bludgeon against musicians whose source material is judged by some bureaucrat to have been written out of hate. Let's hope it doesn't get that far.

Placeholder

2010-11-12T20:03:00.001-08:00

This is one of those posts, of which there's sure to be at least one more yet this month, that I'm writing simply to keep the dream alive. This is my third crack at Blog Month, and where I failed miserably to post on a daily basis in previous years, to this point in November of 2010, I've held my own. So, as you could probably gather from that lead in, I don't really have anything to say today that's worth saying. I only allow (force?) myself to post under these circumstances but one month out of the year. Enjoy it while it lasts, or alternatively, take solace in the fact that there are only 18 days left in November.

Of course, it's only 10 o'clock, and most of the material this month has been posted later in the evening than that. Given another two hours to ruminate, I could surely get myself worked up enough about something or other music related to be able to write an entry that's at least thought provoking, if not actually a useful contribution to the discourse. I'm going to a concert tonight instead. I think some people might be surprised to read that, or maybe even inclined not to believe it, but I'm not making it up. I'm on my bike as soon as this sucker is published; proofreading can wait until I get home, or perhaps tomorrow afternoon, if it's required.

It's true, I do go to hear live music on occasion. I don't go unless I want to hear what's being performed, which means I go less than a lot of musicians do, and some of them think that makes me a spoilsport. Fine with me. I'd rather give better prepared performances, produce more immaculately crafted compositions, and publish more useful and scholarly blog entries than be able to say that "I was there." I don't seem to run into anyone I know at Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts, or when bands like Arp of the Covenant or Behold...The Arctopus play Minneapolis. Maybe if I bitched about it to more people, that would change. More likely, though, is that those people would just go on their blogs and write something like what I'm writing right now about how their friend dissed them for not being at a concert they would have hated.

So, with that in mind, here's my admonishment to everyone to chill out with the whole "support" thing. If you go to concerts for reason other than listening, you're supporting mediocrity more often than you're supporting "the music." I go to listen, not to support, get a gig, socialize or whatever. That's my holier-than-thou retort to the holier-than-thous out there. With that, I'm off to Maude to hear Enormous Quartet. Let the record show that's what I was doing tonight instead of writing something you might have found informative. See you assholes back here tomorrow.

After Gann

2010-11-11T19:32:00.000-08:00

There are musics that I myself utterly loathe, like those of Franz Schubert and the band Journey, that I wish I'd written, because they are accessible enough to seem predestined for wide appeal, even though it's not wide enough to include me.

North

2010-11-10T21:21:00.003-08:00

Last month, the superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools recommended that North High School be phased out. I was on tour all month and only learned of this through an email from KBEM, the jazz radio station that operates out of North High, but the proposal made headlines locally, and rightfully so. Though the message stated that the radio station "continue[s] to have the support of the school board and the Minneapolis Public Schools," the thought of North High closing makes me sick regardless.

I'm a biased observer working with limited information, but there's plenty about this that stinks. A Minnesota Public Radio story from last month states that,

There were more than 1,100 students attending North High School just six years ago. This year, there are just 265, and only about 40 of those are freshman who started this fall.

and later that,

North is the only high school in the city without an attendance zone, which means it's no one's default school. Even families living across the street from North are assigned to Henry or Edison. District leaders acknowledge that, but add the enrollment problem has been around longer than those attendance zones.

To my knowledge, the attendance zones go back to at least 1996, when my parents and I decided to buck them, instead gambling on another Northside high school with low enrollment and a checkered history, Patrick Henry. (North and Henry are arch rivals, and played some wildly entertaining basketball games while I was a student. The prospect of there never being another one of those games is unfortunate by itself.) I don't know what North's attendance zone was in 1996, or if there was one, but I know for a fact that such a system was in place. Even without knowing what North's precise enrollment was in 1996, that last comment rings hollow to my ears.

It was Henry that had enrollment problems in the early 1990's, but it also had a small built-in clientele of affluent, mostly white students from the very outer edges of northwest Minneapolis bordering Robbinsdale and Brooklyn Center, as well as the city's newest outpost for the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, which was what drew me there, and what ultimately proved the school to be worth the substantial commute. They've recently started an IB program at North in hopes of attracting more students. It worked for Henry; according to this data, enrollment there topped out at 1,564 in 2003-04, which is about twice what it was when I got there seven years earlier. It seems they're not willing to give North that kind of time, though.

In the snippets of last night's school board meeting that I skimmed through today, I heard multiple references to "changing the culture" of North High in order to boost achievement. I never attended the school, and I haven't been in the building for years, so I can't speak to what kind of culture has grown up there, but the phrase bothers me anyway. It reeks of focus group naivete. I loved the culture on the Northside, though I could never truly call it my own, and I miss it in many ways. If North is a failing school, it's because the rest of us failed them. Closing the current school and reconstituting it with freshly minted focus group platitudes plastered on the walls isn't going to address the bigger issues at play here, but it's better than not having a high school on the near Northside at all, which would be criminal.

Noob Alert

2010-11-09T12:38:00.007-08:00

When Google notifies you that your band's name has appeared in a new place on the the interweb, it looks like this:

When the person who is responsible for said band name appearing in said new place on said interweb is a real pooper, it looks like this*.

Any of you computer whizzes out there want to explain to me how this works (or take responsibility)?

*May not be work or family appropriate depending on your work or family...bet you're wishing I'd placed this statement in closer proximity to the link right about now.

Addition By Subtraction

2010-11-08T20:32:00.001-08:00

I'm currently working on repurposing an old composition of mine to meet an unforeseen deadline. Early in this blog's reign, I wrote of my discomfort with all of the tributes one encounters in jazz, and mentioned this very tune, my first and last contribution to the cause, and one which even used this dreaded word in the title: "Tribute to Oliver Nelson."

I've certainly written better things in the intervening 8 years or so, but for reasons I won't go into, this tune is about the only thing I have that fits the bill for the current obligation, and so I'm revisiting it. There's potential here which has me questioning the assumption that I'd never play it again, which was probably more about the title than anything else. I'm going to call the new version "Oliver Nelson," as in Chick Corea's tune "Bud Powell," a tune which succeeds musically despite being sort of a stylistic mash-up, much like what I'm after. Ironically, by taking to word "tribute" out of the title, I'm now paying tribute to two, perhaps even three, musicians instead of one. Even so, I'm happier to be doing it more tactfully than I was before.

Me, Myself, and The Music I Want To Hear

2010-11-07T20:59:00.002-08:00

Kyle Gann is a really smart guy and a fine musician, but he can say the darndest things when issues of accessibility are raised. He has this to say about composers who write for themselves:

"I write for myself" is one of those self-defeating clichés that academia acculturates young composers into, like "The music should speak for itself!" I can't imagine that any young artist starts out thinking that his work need only bring pleasure to himself.

(click here to read the entire post)

Actually, I was saying those things as a teen, before I even knew that you could major in music in college. I guess they should have given me my doctorate right then and there. Gann would like to skewer everyone who ever uttered such things by tracing their origins to an easily discredited source, but there are sources and then there are authentic reactions to social dynamics. In my case, I simply got tired of being asked what I was trying to depict in my music, which in all but the rarest of cases is nothing in particular. There's nothing to explain; I'd have to make something up, and that wouldn't be very honest of me. Besides, I hate listening to composers talk about these things, whether they're being honest or not. That's not why I go to concerts, and I didn't learn that from any institution, but rather discovered it about myself through trial and error.

I'm also not really sure how Gann gets from "I write for myself" to "I write to bring pleasure ONLY to myself and no one else can have any." Writing for oneself is nothing more than a methodology; it doesn't forbid the work from appealing to others, even if it decreases the odds somewhat. Gann seems to see a negligible semantic variation as a righteous line in the sand, assailing the saying "I write for myself" while granting that he "write[s] music that [he] want[s] to hear." He also writes that,

...I am disappointed if my music is playing and a passerby, any passerby, doesn't stop to ask, with a twinkle of curiosity, "What is THAT?"

...and thus we are introduced to the ultimate red herring in any discussion of accessibility, the universal piece of music. Gann of course goes on to hedge his bets, saying of writing for oneself that, "It's a defense to be used against having failed to engage the interest of others, which happens to us all now and then." (my italics) Actually, it happens to all of us, all the time. Much as we would all like to have created such a thing, there is not and cannot be a work which accomplishes what Gann is describing. If he wishes to explore this slippery slope, that's his prerogative, and he does no harm to the rest of us by doing so. This earlier passage takes the cake, though, and makes it hard to take him seriously:

...there are musics that I myself dearly love, like those of Phill Niblock and Stefan Wolpe, that I would never write, because they are esoteric enough to seem predestined for only a narrow specialist appeal, even though it's wide enough to include me.

How fortunate for Gann, then, that composers like Niblock and Wolpe ignored such ridiculous moralizing and created the music that they did; otherwise, his and many others' musical lives would be less rich. I'm baffled that someone as astute as Gann would strike such a pose, maintaining an abiding interest in much music of narrow appeal while seemingly expressing contempt for those who might dare to create it.

Most commentators who set musical accessibility and self-gratification in opposition the way Gann does in his missive do so in order to defend their own low-brow pandering. Clearly he is not of this ilk, concluding his entry with a characteristic call for prioritizing artistry over careerism; rather, it's as if he thinks he's staking out the moral high ground, allying accessibility with altruism and esotericism with nihilism. He's even willing to locate some of his favorite music, music he "dearly love[s]," on the wrong side of the tracks to accomplish this. The outcome is baffling on the surface, and the logic is not infallible either.

I would argue that the desire for mass appeal is more harmful than helpful to the cause of making sure everyone has something nice to listen to. The ranges of style and presentation which facilitate the kind of broad accessibility Gann advocates are severely limited compared to the diversity of work that might come from a community of just a few dozen composers. By definition, the work of artists who prioritize accessibility above all else inevitably converges, whereas the work of those who are least moved by external forces ("write for themselves" if you insist) inevitably diverges.

The desire to appeal doesn't mediate each individual artist's work in a direction unique to that artist, but rather mediates all such artists' work in many of the same directions, resulting in a greater level of conformity that threatens to exclude listeners who desire something outside of this mainstream. While each individual composer in such an environment can say that they are serving more listeners than if they simply wrote for themselves, as a group they are serving fewer. It's like volunteering to help build a fourth skateboard park in a wealthy suburb while one poor kid in the inner city goes without a reading tutor; it serves more people, but makes less of a difference.

Milestones

2010-11-06T20:23:00.002-07:00

This is the eighth post I've written this month. Earlier this year, I wrote eight posts total between March 3 and September 27.

The Aging Process

2010-11-06T20:18:00.001-07:00

According to last night's program, the ensemble Zeitgeist , a local new music group which hosted my ensemble C.o.S.T. as part of their fall cabaret, is planning an "Early Music Festival" for next April. The featured composer is Henry Cowell (1867-1965). Though I generally have a low tolerance for hyperbole, I think the idea of labeling work from this era as "early music" in the year 2010 is not only brilliant, but also necessary, and I'm glad someone thought to do it.

To neglect most of the great living composers is one thing; to neglect most of the great music of an entire century is quite another. I wonder if advocacy for "living composers" as a group is one way the behemoth institutions at the top of the classical music food chain get away with continually abdicating their duty. As long as composers Cowell's age are wrongly categorized as "new" or "contemporary," orchestras will continue to point to their latest commissions to middlebrow careerists as evidence of a commitment to the ever expanding tradition, when the only things actually expanding are their noses. Kudos to Zeitgeist for calling them on it.

On Analysis

2010-11-06T16:22:00.002-07:00

It seems to me that the benefits of any musical analysis tend to be rather exclusively available to the person who performed it, and more or less unavailable to anyone who might later come upon the finished product. Think about the time that must go into preparing an analysis for peer-reviewed publication, then think about the time it takes to read said article. The author cannot possibly replicate in any reader the brute force with which such a process tattoos the material on their brain; to do so, the reader must become an analyst themselves, and they might as well start with the primary document, not someone else's reduction of it.

An analogy could be drawn to learning musical material by ear versus from written notation, the latter being more efficient because the content has in a sense been reduced, the former being presented in its purest form. To be candid, I feel that the fear of written music which prevails outside the classical world is largely irrational (maybe I'll tell you why later this month), but there's no denying that to learn by ear is to learn everything all at once, while reading, though it doesn't have to be this way, certainly enables the musician to gloss over important details that aren't on the page, often making it more difficult to add them back in than it would have been to learn them concurrently.

C.o.S.T. Gig 2nite

2010-11-05T07:38:00.003-07:00

Keeping Up

2010-11-04T21:06:00.002-07:00

Earlier today, I was surprised to discover that the University of Minnesota School of Music, from which I received my B.M. five years ago, now requires prospective undergraduate performance majors on tuba, trombone and euphonium to perform orchestral excerpts at their audition for admission. For all I know, this could have changed the year after I was admitted or it could have just changed this year; I haven't had occasion to check the guidelines since I applied 10 years ago, but I have a student who is considering applying and was double-checking some information for him when I made the discovery.

In any case, this wasn't something I was required to do when I auditioned, nor had I so much as smelled an orchestral excerpt before I started college, nor do I now as a private teacher use orchestral excerpts with my high school aged students. The study of excerpts is the study of perfection. You're thinking that there are all kinds of things wrong with that, and you're absolutely right, but that doesn't make the statement any less true. There's an incredible amount of groundwork to lay before one can approach even the most technically elementary of excerpts, at least with the intent of perfecting it for audition purposes. Less advanced students certainly could benefit from the process as well, even if it's clear from the outset that they have no chance of getting the excerpt audition-ready, but if that's the case, why not specifically address these more basic deficiencies, which probably effect everything they do?

This is what immediately sprang to mind when I saw the guidelines, but of course, auditioning high schoolers on orchestral excerpts has been the norm for some time at the top conservatories. On that level, it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that the universitories are beginning to follow suit. It is notable, however, that excerpts are not required for any other instruments. This would seem to indicate that this came down not from Room 200, but rather from the low brass faculty, who are all excellent and all have their heads on straight. This leads me to believe that things have changed quite a bit at my alma mater, since I can recall encountering only one freshman low brass player in my four years there who showed up on day one with a solid grasp of excerpt playing. The fact that several other players not included in that statement have gone on to great things sums up my reservations about such a requirement pretty well, but I don't run the school.

Without delving into just how great the things I myself have gone on to may or may not be, it is stating the obvious at this point to say that I was not that person either, and hence my gut reaction was distress, since I myself most likely would have been deterred from applying altogether had this requirement been in place when I was in high school. On the other hand, though, while I in no way regret choosing music as a career, it has been clear to me for some time that I would have been a much happier undergraduate if I'd chosen a degree program that afforded me more electives than a performance degree does. Lo and behold, the excerpts are not required for B.A. in Music applicants, leaving me to wonder if this requirement which on the surface would seem to have been designed to keep people like me out of performance programs might actually have saved me from myself and all but forced me into a more balanced undergraduate experience. We'll never know.

I also maintain a certain amount of trepidation about labeling some degree programs so generally ("Performance") and others more specifically ("Jazz Studies") when in fact they are often equally specialized. Many of the conservatories which have led the way in escalating these admission requirements also have much more specific nomenclature in place to indicate that a degree program specifically emphasizes orchestral performance. On the other hand, the more general labels function quite well at the more aesthetically pluralistic music schools, acknowledging that students must ultimately find their own way. Perhaps one day I'll earn a graduate degree in 20th and 21st Century Quasi-Atonal Jazz-Influenced Performance, Composition, Arranging, Transcription and Literature. Not likely, but there's a better chance it will be called that than "Orchestral Studies."

Visualizers

2010-11-03T21:34:00.002-07:00

From whatever moment it was that I first became "serious" about music as a teen (too serious many would say) right up to the present day, few things have bothered me more than the appending of non-essential extra-musical stimuli to the listening experience. Besides the fact that I usually enjoy the experience less that way, I'm prone to take offense to any implication that music is not good enough by itself.

As time has gone on, it has become clearer to me that the problem is not necessarily with all extra-musical stimuli, but rather those which are particularly intellectually obtrusive. In other words, there are, on one hand, stimuli which distract whatever part(s) of our brains we're using to listen, and, on the other hand, those which appeal to some other available pathway, therefore truly adding to the listening experience rather than merely competing with it. For me, the distractions include language, meaning, allusion, representation, and for the most part, emotion as well (not mine, mind you, but rather that supposedly communicated by the stimulus). The enhancements, then, are exclusively limited to sensory stimuli as abstract as the music itself.

The word "visualizer" was not in my vocabulary until today, at least not in reference to software plug-ins. As it turns out, this is the term used to refer to the screensaver-like thing that some media players display while music is playing. I ran into one today and kind of dug it, which quite surprised me on one level given the hang-ups stated above, yet makes sense considering that the content was, in fact, completely abstract and clear of potential distractions. It was obviously reacting to the music that was being heard, yet whether by virtue of being well-designed or of my having reached some sort of inner detente with the extra-musical, it truly seemed to enhance rather than detract from the experience.

The conceit of unpredictability is one reason I find such things (more) successful. In a sense, this contributes to the overall degree of abstraction by undermining the development of expectations; visualizers which establish direct, consistent and perceptible correspondence between a sonic and visual stimulus have thus ventured into the realm of representation and association, which I place decisively in the distraction category. This is why I find things like Animusic so worthless, even creepy; paradoxically, it is this very correspondence between the musical and the visual that experts seem to have glommed on to as a boon to the developing brain, which more or less ensures that the bulk of such productions will take this direction.

Of course, it wasn't tough to tease out the pattern in many early screensavers, and I imagine that while technology has advanced substantially since then, a listener who spends many hours a day in front of the most abstract of visualizers would sooner or later, and consciously or subconsciously, develop associations that would ultimately undermine the element of abstraction. The specter of constantly seeking out new plug-ins to keep things fresh gives me pause when I think about making visualizers part of my listening routine, but I might try it anyway.

I also realized that, for some reason and without really thinking about it, I had developed the erroneous belief that visualizers were a PC thing, and was somewhat surprised upon looking into the matter to find that my very own copy of iTunes has them as well. It seems that the ones that come with it kind of suck, but people make their own, and you can download many of them for free. The fact that so many people would take the time to design and distribute these things speaks to the fact that music is, in fact, not good enough by itself for many listeners, and that still strikes a nerve. Even so, I may have seen the light just a bit today, and it was all swirly and neon looking.

Read This

2010-11-02T21:10:00.001-07:00

Complexity Wars

Blog Month III

2010-11-01T17:40:00.002-07:00

Installment #3 of the Blog Month project commences today.
Find explanations here and here.
Previous efforts are dissected here and here.
View the complete body of work here and here.

Hear, hear.

It's Not Cute Anymore

2010-10-18T10:11:00.002-07:00

When middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, Middle-American people encounter a musician in their teens or twenties, they tend to look as if they've encountered a grown adult playing with blocks, or perhaps a poodle wearing a Girbaud onesie. Thanks to the physiology of the human central nervous system, the uncontrollable reflex to smile at the sight of such a thing always manifests itself a split second before the conscious mind has had a chance to register and evaluate the bigger picture. Hence, the look the young musician (or the poodle) catches out of the corner of their eye is so often precisely that moment when cognition begins to mediate reflex in quite the opposite direction. The resulting expression is an odd combination of glee and pity.

I've spent years looking forward to the day when I can give a performance without catching one of these looks before, during or after the show. That day seems to be getting farther away even as I get older. In part, this is the bed that arts advocacy's emphasis on extrinsic benefits has made for the rest of us: when our very existence as artists is justified exclusively by our art's worth to the developing brain, what use could those whose brains are finished developing possibly have for us? Music is cute, at least until it's not cute anymore. It makes kids good at math, at least until they enroll in a conservatory where they won't so much as smell a math class. It's harmless, that is until they're saddled with five-figure student debt and unable to find a job of any kind. It's good for the soul, unless, well...you know, it sounds like that gobbledygook modern stuff that no one really listens to.

We have Legos for kids to play with to help them with spatial relations and clarinets for them to blow into to make them good at math. Then, once the test scores are compiled, the measurable outcomes achieved, and the grant funding secured, the clarinets and Legos get packed away together in a polystyrene tote, whisked out of sight and mind until the first grandchild is born. At least that's how it's supposed to work. God help those of us who never learned to put our toys away.

If in your adult life a perfect stranger your age or older has ever encountered you, alone, earnestly playing with Legos and summarily shot you one of those looks before their conscious mind has had a chance to inventory all of the possible explanations for why they're seeing what they're seeing, then perhaps you've felt a small fraction of what it feels like to walk in front of an entire audience of people your parents' age and older, unpack a tuba, and do something with it to betray the fact that you've done little else for the last decade. If not, hopefully this summary of what it feels like to be on the wrong side of the smirk will help you stop the next one before it starts.

C.o.S.T. Fall 2010 Season

2010-10-03T07:58:00.003-07:00

D-2 Mock-Up

2010-10-01T13:35:00.004-07:00

Several months ago, it occurred to me to try using pitch shift effects to obtain notes that are out of my range on tuba. Here's my first concerted effort at it:

The "D" Series: D-2

(score here)

If you've been to a C.o.S.T. performance, you've heard this piece before; it was one of the first flexibly scored pieces I wrote with that group in mind, and so far we've played it at every show. On top of the many things that intrigue me about flexible scoring, there's the fact that by using pitch shift, I can record the entire piece all by myself (I did use Sibelius for the snare drum part, but could always have a percussionist friend overdub it later). Obviously, sound quality suffers more as you move the pitch further, but all in all, it's a far more human way to hear a piece than MIDI playback through a notation program.

I played as much of the music in the written octave as I could, and played many of the higher parts down a fourth or fifth rather than an octave so as to minimize the total amount of pitch shifting necessary. This means that most of the middle parts do not consistently use the same timbre, but in this format, it doesn't matter much (long live flexible scoring). The biggest challenge is that pitch shifting up magnifies tremendously even the slightest flaws in articulation, and I sometimes found myself trying out a few different transpositions before finding one where the right notes responded the right way.

After pitch shifting where necessary, I applied Audacity's "Noise Reduction" effect and "Columbia LP" equalization (performing these three steps out of order causes the appearance of pops and clicks in odd places). I also did more than a little bit of editing, which considering that Audacity doesn't have a built-in crossfade feature, often worked better than it reasonably well should have without it. The result is far superior to previous overdubbing projects I've undertaken with GarageBand (a program I've officially lost patience with), but could still be improved, I think, even using free software and a bare-bones set-up. More to come.

Evidence

2010-09-28T20:20:00.002-07:00

According to Michael Daugherty's bio, he is "one of the most frequently commissioned, programmed, and recorded composers on the American concert music scene today." He studied at North Texas, The Manhattan School of Music, IRCAM and Yale (not too shabby), and currently teaches composition at Michigan (also not befitting the shabbiness department). Here he is on YouTube doing something many in his profession would like to see outlawed:

Many thoughts come to mind. Here is a renowned composer based at a renowned school who not only thinks it's permissible to work this way, but apparently does so himself, at least some of the time. He apparently is also confident enough in the results to out himself on YouTube, where pointy-headed colleagues at other schools (if they've yet learned of and figured out how to use the internet) might catch him. This is progress.

Whether or not it was intended this way, I also see this video as an advertisement for his (and, implicitly, the department's) openness to students who compose acoustic concert music using computers and software. This has to be something many prospective students wonder about when applying to a school, and it's not like you can just ask, especially if you fear the worst. Good for them for going right out and answering that question, and a further pat on the back for what is undoubtedly a shrewd business decision.

Having said all of that, I wonder if what we see here isn't also a busy composer attempting to balance a full-time academic job with a successful freelance career, and whadya know, he gets tabbed to make a silly promotional video for the university, which expects him to offer an accessible explanation of the modern concert composer's craft in less than four minutes. Who knows? Maybe this was the easiest solution to that rather ridiculous demand and he whipped out his noligraph and parchment as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. I'm not betting on it, but it's possible. You do get the impression that convenience played a role, but given the can of worms this could open with the traditionalists, I doubt anyone would venture into this territory without a slightly better reason.

In any case, the key, as he says, is that anything a composer uses to capture their ideas is a technology. All technologies have their limitations, and all composers must overcome the limitations of their tools in order to be successful. Proving notation software to be unsuitable for composition involves more than merely showing that it has limitations; rather, one must demonstrate that these limitations are insurmountable.

Dennis? Kyle?

The Tuba as New Media

2010-08-29T22:27:00.002-07:00

It is one thing to show the tuba to be capable of more than what it is asked to do in the orchestra, but it is another thing entirely to show these capabilities to be useful. No matter how great the skill of future generations of tuba players, these generations will be stifled at every turn by any musical culture which places such disproportionate emphasis on 18th and 19th century orchestral repertoire. In order for their larger contributions to be acknowledged, those contributions must be valued, and in order for them to be valued, the musical styles and idioms in which they are made must be valued as well. The task of advocating for these new musical styles is both more vital and more arduous than that of advocating for one's instrument, yet it seems increasingly clear that the latter will not be accomplished before the former. The symphony orchestra repertoire is arguably the Western musical tradition's greatest contribution, but it has not, will not, and indeed cannot be the place where the tuba finds its voice as an equal instrumental partner in the contemporary musical landscape. That landscape will be shaped by a vast array of both traditional and experimental musical media, among them myriad settings to which the tuba has far more to offer than it does to the orchestra. Of course, any instrument has the most to offer to idioms which it helps to shape from the outset, and so the more tuba players who are active as creative voices rather than passive "musical instrument operators," the more prominent place the instrument will occupy in the future of music.

Scores -- Sonatine -- Scriabin

2010-07-21T19:24:00.003-07:00

I've been allergic to score study my entire musical life. It's too easy to blame this solely on my education and not at all on myself, but I would at least start the discussion there. In college, conductors and instrumental teachers occasionally scolded us (collectively, and in the vaguest possible terms) for not doing more score study, perhaps unaware that we had no clue how to go about it, or that almost no one in the theory or musicology areas had touched the subject. We spent some time with a few movements from the classical piano repertoire in my final semester of tonal theory, which was a welcome departure from the Baldwell and Skankter purgatory we'd been living in for two years, but it was a fleeting and shallow expedition, adjourning well before I would have felt any better equipped than I already was to jump into something with more than two independent staves.

The next theory class I took was 20th Century Theory, where we spent the majority of the class walking through some pretty thorny orchestral works, highlighted by Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, a radical departure to the opposite extreme for which few (if any) of us were truly prepared for. For better or worse, our professor in that class held our hands and wiped our butts for us, obviously fully aware of our condition and having no intention of causing us to break a sweat. The primary analytical endeavor in that class was to name motives, sections, and other musical ideas metaphorically. This seems to be the one method of analysis endorsed by shut-in academics and anti-intellectual pop culture mavens alike, yet one which to this day I still cannot see the practical value of. Certainly in my case, it left me right back where I started, which was completely unable to hear score and lacking a systematic method for approaching in its written form the majority of the composed music that interests me. A few months later, I received a B.M. anyway and no one batted an eye.

Yes, it's easy to blame my education, but of course, I could have tried harder. I could have made score study a priority. I could have continued taking piano lessons after passing piano proficiency. I could have made it my job to perfect my sight-transposition skills. Instead, I was playing tuba many hours a day, taking as many non-music electives as the department would let me get away with, shamefully devoting and hour or two of my daily practice to jazz improvisation, and spending my weekends and whatever other slivers of time were left over frantically composing the music I didn't have time to compose while all the rest of this was going on. Given the same less-than-ideal constraints on my time, I'm not sure I'd do anything differently if I had it to do over; the skills I honed as an undergraduate have served me awfully well in a lot of ways, and if some knucklehead music school adviser would have told me that I had to learn to read score before being allowed to get down to business on these more central (at the time) concerns, I probably would have quit right then and there. Nonetheless, I've always felt handicapped by my unfamiliarity with scores, and as my general aspirations have broadened and moderated somewhat from, "I want to be the best tuba player ever," to something more like, "I want to be a compelling tuba player who performs his own compelling compositions whilst writing a compelling blog entry every couple of months and occasionally convincing his students that the music he listens to is compelling," I've finally reached the point where my desire to read score is no longer merely a consequence of blind ambition, but rather appears destined to become, if it hasn't already, a matter of necessity.

Hearing score is, admittedly, a daunting task, akin to perfect pitch in a sense, and perhaps not entirely unrelated. Even prestigious composition competitions judged by Big Name Composers® tend to require or strongly recommend the submission of a recording to accompany a score. Either this is yet another of their farcical methods for weeding out prospective entrants who aren't really "serious," or, like most of the rest of us, they can't hear score very well either and don't feel comfortable judging a piece without having heard it realized. So, while it's something I wish I could do, I realize that it's neither the most practical thing to go about achieving, nor is it necessarily the most utilitarian skill I could devote all that time to developing. To be clear, I have no intention of getting to know pieces first from scores and only later from recordings or performances. For me, seeing the score has always been a bit like discovering the Wizard of Oz to be just a little fat guy behind a curtain. I feel the same way about transcribing jazz solos, whether I write them down or not. In addition, I'm generally satisfied with my ability to pick things up by ear. I tend to end up with myriad influences in my music whose work I've never so much as glanced at in written form, and I'm often astonished in skimming through earlier works of mine at how much I've assimilated solely by ear.

I'm also weary of the notational idolatry that prevails in some circles. ("This score looks cool, I can't wait to hear what it sounds like.") I think it's important to stay grounded in sound, and avoid being seduced by the more arbitrary aspects of notation. It is both a blessing and a curse that written music more often then not looks beautiful on the page whether or not the piece is any good, or for that matter, whether the notation itself is even legible for practical purposes. I've always felt that this is merely a fringe benefit, and ought not distract us from the main event. That's why I almost never tweak any default settings in Sibelius, and have been loathe to use the jazz fonts, though I give in occasionally. Surely some will lament this loss of individuality among composers who engrave their own music; call me a sociopath, but I'm actually rather enamored of the idea. When scores resemble each other so closely in appearance as to render the musical content the most (or only) meaningful difference between them, well, congratulations, the musical content is the most meaningful difference between them. Gone, then, is any possibility of the calligraphy influencing our opinion of the work's content.

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The million dollar question, of course, is, "Where do I start?" It's a question I've been asking myself for a long time. During my last year of school, a maverick professor hipped us to a score reading text that starts with two single-note lines in familiar clefs and gradually adds staves, clefs, and transpositions to the mix until suddenly at the end of the book you're reading full orchestra music. It sounds like the most logical way to go about things, unless of course you're both pathologically impatient and a shitty pianist (guilty as charged). It certainly would be a wonderful challenge and an excellent parlor trick to be able to plop down an orchestral score and play it at the keyboard; this, of course, encompasses all of the skills I'm after, but also many others which aren't essential to my ends and would needlessly occupy boatloads of time (specifically the part about the piano). So, as an alternative, I'm starting simpler, trying instead to come up with more conceptually accessible ways of working through a score whereby each and every note is momentarily made the focal point.

Specifically, what I've come up with is (a) playing through the parts individually (on tuba), and/or (b) copying the score by hand. My theory in taking these approaches is that merely staring at a score expecting important details to jump out hasn't worked very well, and so a more active approach is in order, even if in some ways it's no more focused. No one would doubt that staring aimlessly at a full orchestral score without a specific task or outcome in mind would be a pointless endeavor, but I would argue from experience that it's no different with, say, an unaccompanied tuba solo. Of course, I've long been capable of hearing a single part in my head, especially my own instrument's part, yet I suspect that were I tasked with analyzing such a piece without being allowed to play through it, I wouldn't catch a lot of important detail. Playing is study, and I've long maintained that composers and theorists would do well to try it sometime if they really want to know what they're talking about. What I wrote about in that previous post is the experience of performing a great piece as part of a large ensemble and thus hearing the inner workings of the piece from, well, inside the ensemble. In my experience, there's nothing like it, and being, as I said, by no means discontented with taking things in aurally, I can't honestly say at this point that I expect score study or anything else to replace it. It's an irreplaceable experience, and while the quota of constant participation in large ensembles imposed by brute force on music school undergrads practically numbed me to all conceivable benefits, I do (finally) miss it a bit nowadays, mainly for this reason.

Playing through the parts of a large score individually is certainly a different ballgame, and not one which necessarily threatens to help one actually hear the full score any better once the instrument is taken away. However, it does compliment the performance experience in an essential way, which I imagine might be obtainable with just a score and a quiet room, but which for spazzes like me is better undertaken with the horn in our hands so as to help us focus better and longer. I believe it's more useful to take small sections of a piece and play through each part in succession in a single sitting than it is to play through only a couple parts at a time from start to finish over the course of multiple study sessions. Playing through parts happens more or less in real time, and so tackling complete parts from start to finish can be tough to accommodate logistically. I also have found in other areas of instrumental practice that intense focus on a small amount of material maximizes the amount of information I actually retain, and in the case of score study, the "material" (and the challenge) is vertical, not horizontal.

Needless to say this activity also puts the player through their sight-reading paces. As a tuba player, I can't imagine actually needing to sight read in tenor or alto clef as part of a professional performance, but stranger things have happened. And again, for those of us who play only arranger's piano, realizing these parts on our primary instrument is a good way to maximize information retention. (The visual aspect of the piano is also very powerful, but in my opinion moreso with polyphony than monophony. Sometimes having the other 87 keys just staring at you can be disconcerting.)

The first piece I undertook to play through in this way was Eugene Bozza's "Sonatine" for brass quintet. As there are only 5 parts to deal with, the score is not altogether overwhelming, but there's just a bit more going on than what I realistically feel like I can hear in my head, and the trombone part is almost entirely in tenor clef, which makes for a nice challenge. Coincidentally, there's also fodder here for the notation-as-art-in-and-of-itself discussion, as this is one score which is not nearly as pleasing to look at as it is to hear realized. The sloppy manuscript is legible enough to play from, but not at all pleasing to look at, and even included a stem on the wrong side of a notehead (horizontally, that is, not vertically), a minor mistake in practical terms, yet one that makes it look as if a child copied the score.

It's hard to accept that the authoritative published version of such a widely played and highly esteemed piece of music could be so poorly engraved, especially when the score and a set of 5 parts (which, mercifully, have been more or less properly engraved in LeDuc's distinctive house style) costs almost $70. Here's yet another reason that I really have to kick myself in the butt to find the motivation to sit down with a score: too often it's like looking at those tabloid pictures of scrubbed out celebrities without their precious makeup on. In any case, if you're not a brass player, you probably don't know this piece, and if that's the case, I strongly urge you to check it out. It's damn hard, but playable, and in my mind, the first two movements would be great music in any instrumentation. It's so ubiquitous, apparently, that some members of my quintet don't want to play it, this after I spent nearly a decade of my life quintetless and wanting to play this piece above all others. When worlds collide...

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In contrast to what I'm advocating above, the value of copying a score, whether by hand or with notation software, I think needs less explaining. Any technophobes out there can withhold their criticism of the software this time because, yes, I've decided to work by hand. For all the harsh words I had for the Bozza score, my own manuscript is abominable, and though I can't at this precise moment in time think of a scenario by which it might become essential for me to improve, I figure there's no harm in doing so just for it's own sake. My first score copying endeavors were, however, done with a computer when I was in high school. I may have done more than one piece this way, but memory fails me in that regard; the only one I remember for certain is the fugue from Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. At the time, my only concern was to get the computer to play back this incredible music for me so I didn't have to beg my dad to play it on the harpsichord, which he had been doing occasionally around that time. When I told him what I'd done, he remarked that many great composers had studied that way; I don't think I let it slip out that my ends were not nearly so noble, but while I can't recite the piece from memory today, it did make a lasting impact on me, enough at least for me to quote it obliquely (without referencing the score) in one of the better pieces I wrote as an undergraduate.

Eventually, I also discovered (as most of us do with time) that you can purchase and otherwise obtain recordings of music you want to listen to being played on real instruments by skilled performers, and so the need to copy scores into the computer to hear them played back disappeared rather quickly and quietly. I do wish, however, that I hadn't completely left behind the impulse to copy, as it hit me like a ton of bricks several months ago that it might be the best first step of them all to towards turning myself into a score reader. Enter Scriabin's Fourth Piano Sonata, specifically the second and final movement. On the surface, Scriabin's early and late sonatas don't seem to have been written by the same person, and while you've probably already correctly guessed that my greatest sympathies lie with the later works (beginning with the 6th), the 4th and the 5th are fascinating in their own rights as they seem to represent the transitional period (and let's face it, transitional periods are, if not always the most musically successful, certainly endlessly interesting for those of us wonks who fancy ourselves composers and are inclined to look at things with an academic eye).

Of course, I first discovered the work by listening, and had listened to it a ton before I ever looked at a score. Not to belabor the point or anything, but boy was it a shock (not a good one; it never is) to see what all of this looks like on paper. Were a student to bring me a piece like this, I would tell them it was unplayable; many sections of the piece would have been more clearly notated on three staves rather than two, and this became, almost by coincidence, a significant component of my copying endeavor which I'll say more about later. Add to this the fact that it's in the key of F-sharp major but also takes more than the requisite number of late romantic tonal detours, resulting in several bars that I had to stare at for minutes at a time to make sense of harmonically. It's also in 12/8 time, making for some (visually) loooong bars with double sharps carrying through from beat 2 to beat 12 and other such shenanigans. In short, it's a score that has only two staves, uses key signatures, and has four big beats to the bar, and yet was an absolute bear to get my head around much of the time. This is a big reason I decided to copy it out by hand, playing through each measure (or beat, if necessary) on the piano as slowly as I had to.

The even more bizarre part of the story, however, is that I had already decided (indeed, begun) to transcribe the piece for brass, and if you know the piece, you can see why I'd call that bizarre. I can't imagine a more inherently pianistic piece of music, nor one which could more throughly defy direct transcription to most any combination of orchestral instruments. There are, however, substantial march-like sections of the piece that have suggested a brass realization to me from the very first hearing, and when I joined the CSBQ, I had at my disposal for the first time a capable quintet eager for new repertoire, and so it was time to shit or get off the pot. In stricter terms, what I'm creating is an "arrangement," since I'll have to do more than just extract 5 voices from the piano score and give those parts to the quintet. Rather, I've already virtually recomposed one section of the piece out of necessity, as well as changing many octave placements and chord spacings in order to keep the blood flowing through my trumpet players' faces. I've mostly been a curmudgeon about arranging throughout my musical life, and I absolutely stand by what I wrote in my C.o.S.T. manifesto, namely that,

"...in order for the transcription of existing music to be a valid and viable proposition, it must promise to somehow enhance the musical work in question rather than merely enhancing the professional outlook of the musician, and is otherwise an act of vanity in absence of inspiration."

I didn't have to go back and reread my own words to acquire a certain amount of trepidation about this project; I had toyed with idea in my head for a couple of years before actually jumping into it, having repeatedly decided it was not worth the trouble only to have the meekest of the voices in my head, the optimist, chime in at inopportune moments. Even after I finished the first third or so of the arrangement, things had already gotten quite difficult, and while I'd created something that I thought would sound pretty good, in all honesty, it felt to me quite a bit like "an act of vanity in absence of inspriation."

Where all this changed was when out of due diligence I began seeking out additional recordings of the piece with which to balance the impression of it I had gained from many hearings of Ruth Laredo's ravishing yet somewhat over-rubatoed version (of course, I had to look at the score to fully understand the extent of the interpretation, which speaks well for looking at scores, but also supports my claim that it's more often than not a shock and a disappointment). It was through this search that I discovered that the second movement is pretty much unplayable, or so one might be tempted to conclude after sampling the commercially available recordings. I did, however, eventually settle on a recording I found through the dearly departed Lala service by Italian pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi, who makes great music out of the piece without missing notes*.

His performance notwithstanding, I ended up tempering my cynicism about essentially recomposing this piece for brass after realizing that it is bursting with ideas that almost no pianist can adequately realize by themselves. Such is the best justification I'm aware of for reworking another composer's music, not in the sense that the ideas ought to be changed per se, but rather clarified. The brass quintet is well-suited to some sections of this piece and horribly ill-suited to others; even so, I believe there are ideas here that threaten to both transcend instrumentation and survive reduction. Of course, a four-hands rendition would also solve the problem and be far more faithful to the composer's intent, but even so, my vanity detector is suitably placated for the moment, and I have enough confidence in my own composerly abilities and accomplishments at this point to be confident that history won't judge me as someone merely "picking the pockets of the masters" just to feed my ego and advance my career, since I have my own music with which to accomplish those goals.

Deciphering some of the denser moments in this movement was painstaking, and of course the physical act of writing occupied nearly as much time as the actual "studying" did. Nonetheless, I'm a big enough dork that I had fun, and I look forward to studying many many more of my favorite pieces this way. I stuck with three staves throughout the movement, even when two would have sufficed. Initially, I made this decision simply because, on 12 line paper, the chances of ending up with a single unusable line at the bottom of the page when alternating haphazardly between 2- and 3-line systems was at least 50%, and being the treehugger that I am, these were unacceptable odds. In the end, though, this led to an important realization that I intend on observing throughout future projects as well: rather than copying the score precisely as originally engraved, why not expand smaller scores and reduce larger ones? That way, you'll end up with two copies with different salient features, one which fits all of the information into a smaller visual area while making quite a clutter out of the individual voices, and another which isolates each voice more clearly but does so at the cost of greater demand on one's field of vision. It seems to me that they compensate for each others' weaknesses as far as suitability for study goes, and so as extreme as any given score might be to one or the other end of this spectrum, I plan on copying it out the other way and then using both copies interchangeably from that point on depending upon the analytical task at hand. Another idea I've had (though I didn't have it until after I started copying this movement) is to string the pages of the copied version together continuously so as to more closely model time in the visual configuration of the score. (Anyone out there sell rolls of paper with staves printed on them?)

A final caveat about this score which I don't expect will apply in the future: in transcribing the piece for brass, I'm taking it down a half step, putting it in the brass friendly key of F Major. There are long sections of the movement throughout which one can simply pretend the key signature is one flat rather than six sharps, but there are others where a sea of accidentals makes reading the music as is enough of a challenge, and sight transposing it all but impossible. It also truly modulates at one point, key change and all, to D Major (the bVI if you insist), but true to late romanticism, the music doesn't stay there nearly as long as the new key signature does, and that's also a pain. Long story short, I copied it out in the new key rather than the original one, which added yet another layer to the study (helping rather than hurting, I think).

Here's a passage from the public domain score available on IMSLP:

...and here's the same passage in my own hand (don't L, please, at least not OL):

*It's curious to note that this recording comes from a competition, but upon listening, it's no wonder he did so well in it. Momma always told me (yes, my mom actually has said this to me more than once) that the people to keep your eye on aren't the one's who win music competitions, but the one's who finish runner up. Perhaps this penetrated my subconscious a bit too deeply, resulting in my resume consisting of way too many Finalist, Honorable Mention, and Alternate entries and not nearly enough *Winners*. Or maybe I should just have practiced more...