"official communication" from fickle ears staff, re: "the jobs that they were counting on"

We recently received the following "official communication" from the local of which we are a member and under whose auspices our present employment is conducted:

...The Eagles are on tour right now and are scheduled to perform a few times in the Southern California area. Although they are not performing in our jurisdiction, they are contracting the string students from California State University Fullerton to replace the professional musicians that would normally be contracted for these performances. This is not the first time CSUF has done this. ...

The institution is displacing professional musicians’ jobs with their students; jobs that their students are presumably training for in the first place. ... Under these circumstances, by the time their students graduate, the jobs that they were counting on for will be no longer be filled by professional musicians. ...

We of course find this part of such stories to be at best the fifth or sixth most important part.

Also, we do greatly value the privilege of being represented by a union, but we wish this union would be more coherent in its stated positions.

First: people who willingly attend Eagles-with-orchestra concerts can't tell the difference between student and professional musicians. Those who maintain this not to be the case have a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events.

Second: whatever the failings of such an audience, these are not moral failings. It must be said that they betoken success too: namely the smashing success of the education-industrial complex in taking up the cause of the performing arts. We are unfamiliar with the CSUF strings but generally we find it unsurprising that a college group could be adequate for much "professional" work. We've heard and played in several that were. We've also done extensive "professional" work and found the bar to be quite a bit lower than we, and ostensibly the union (but only sometimes), would prefer. In two different locals in two different states we have been left mystified and incredulous at the union roster on our instrument, which extends to anyone who knows someone they can borrow a tuba from. At that point, to get bothered at students taking over "professional" work is absurd. How much of the local "tuba" roster could carry the jock strap of a state-school tuba player?

Third: ditto above with regard to quantity as well as quality. It is not breaking news that more students train in the performing arts than can work in the performing arts. The industry and the union both get what they want when more musicians split a fixed amount of work. Predictably both pay lip service to "music education." Less often but equally predictably, they also pay lip service to audience outreach. But musicianship has proven more amenable to progressive reform than has reception. You can build a better mousetrap, but you can't train anyone else to notice or force them to care.

Fourth: the notion that pre-professionals "were counting on" pickup orchestra gigs with The Eagles is one which strains credulity. The union declares that they should, the industry that they shouldn't. In any case, we suspect they are not. They and their teachers are aiming much, much higher. This is as it should be, and this is what countless union and industry photo ops have goaded us towards: high motivation can come only from high aspirations. Those among the professorate who have had significant careers outside of academia know that students who are good enough to get admitted to 4-year college as music majors already play well enough to do pickup orchestra with The Eagles, no matter if the gig is union or dark. Anyone who maintains this not to be the case has a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events. They have an equally formidable task in explaining why the skills required to play pickup orchestra with The Eagles are post-secondary and graduate-level skills rather than elementary ones; why this is what music students should be doing while their peers are reading Plato and Kant, plotting regression equations, and extracting abcessed teeth; why and how this "aspiration" can be anything other than crippling and cynical in comparison to everything else the performing arts have to offer a young person. The indications are all around us that Eagles-with-orchestra skills are elementary skills, but many of us would rather hold out hope-against-hope of filling a couple more dates on the calendar than think too hard (or at all) about what is actually to happen on those dates. The cynical proposal that aspiring freelancers attend business school rather than music school speaks a certain truth, but it is not the truth that its cynical utterers think they are speaking. They think they are extolling the wisdom of markets; in fact they are pointing up an area of exceptional failure of markets and of the conceit to meritocracy, a failure so drastic that it is not the least bit representative of general market dynamics. For this and many other reasons, we ourselves prefer the idealstic outlook which challenges performing arts students to maximize their potential and to seek a distinctive artistic voice rather than bending themselves and their work toward an existing career path. But this does nothing to raise audience receptivity to those new voices. Nor does either industry or the union have any use for self-directed artists with day jobs. Prospectively we cannot really say what (if any) value self-directed artists might have. No one has any use for them, until they do.

Lasch—Educating the Whole Child

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[128] The decline of intellectual competence cannot be accounted for, as some observers would have it, on the reactionary assumption that more students from minority- and low-income groups are taking tests, going to college, and thus dragging down the scores. The proportion of these students has remained unchanged over the last ten years; meanwhile the decline of academic achievement has extended to elite schools.

...

Lasch—Tolerance and Indifference

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[122]
Our twentieth-century experience of imperial rivalries, international competition for markets, and global wars makes it hard for us to share the Enlightenment's conviction that capitalism would promote world peace. The comsopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive. "Benevolence," moreover—the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice—presents itself to us as a singlularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion. We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand—
[123]
"my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind"—leaves us a little cold.

It is important to remind ourselves, therefore, that cosmopolitanism and "benevolence" commended themselves, in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the fierce partisanship now blamed for two hundred years of religious warfare. Religious tolerance may have reflected a growing indifference to religion, but at least it held out the hope of peace.




[123—footnote to above]
Burke attacked "these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration," just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. "That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity."

...

[148]
ambivalence was a more appropriate response to progress than unyielding opposition or wholehearted approval. Indeed it was the only appropriate response, when progress was identified so closely with fate; and there is a certain heroism in the classical sociologists' determination to face unflinchingly facts that could not be altered, in their view, and to "bear the fate of the times like a man," as Weber put it. Weber's conception of the scientific vocation may have conceded too much to the view that science demands a rigorous abstention from moral judgment, but his warning against "academic prophecy" remains indispensable. "In the lecture rooms of the university," Weber insisted, no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity." It is impossible not to acknowledge the force of this, even for those who have seen Weber's ideal of heroic detachment degenerate into the familiar academic accommodation with political power that sides with the status quo, in effect, while disclaiming any intention of taking sides. "Science as a Vocation" and its companion, "Politics as a Vocation," have been put to purposes Weber himself would have disavowed, serving to excuse moral and political complacency, to rid scholarship of "value judgments," to reinforce the notion that ethical judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary, and finally to banish them even from politics itself, leaving politics to the managers and technocrats. Far from encouraging "intellectual integrity" or protecting the university from political interference, a misconceived ideal of scientific objectivity has brought about a rapprochement between the university and the state, in which academic expertise serves to lubricate the machinery of power; and it is important to remind ourselves that Weber, often invoked by those who wish to limit both scholarship and politics to purely technical matters, never endorsed such a trivial conception of either.

Lasch—Enthusiasm Verging on Sentimentalism

Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations
(1973)

Ch. XII, "The "Counter-Culture""

[subheading 3. Some Cultural and Political Implications of
Ethnic Particularism]

[192] The experience of pre-industrial peoples brought forcibly into contact with modern technological society has been highly ambiguous. On the one hand, industrial technology and mass communications have had an undeniably disruptive effect on many patterns of pre-industrial culture; but on the other hand, they have often strengthened the determination to preserve older ways, precisely as a defense against disorganization and loss of identity. ...

[193]
In the United States, and probably in other advanced countries as well, the revival of ethnic particularism has coincided with a new wave of enthusiasm for popular culture on the part of intellectuals and educated people generally —an enthusiasm verging on sentimentalism. Support for black culture is at least as great among educated whites as it is among blacks themselves; and whites are much more likely to romaniticize it, since they do not experience at first hand the poverty that is also an element of black culture, along with its positive features. ...

The identification of reason with technological rationalization has given rise to a revolt against reason itself, one aspect of which is a revival of cultural primitivism among the educated. Intellectual and literary culture has come to be widely regarded as an instrument of exploitation and domination; thus we have the demand, advanced by some black nationalists and supported by many white radicals, that "black culture" replace "white culture" in the schools; that English be taught as a foreign language; and that in the universities, black studies be defined as a completely autonomous branch of learning. To what extent is the scholarly interest in black culture itself tinged with these attitudes?

[194]
In a recent essay on black culture...John Szwed suggests in passing that the expulsion of whites from the civil rights movement was prompted not only by the blacks' desire to assert political control but by a rejection of "unreasonable and irrelevant white cultural models of change." This assertion seems to me to reflect a fairly widespread tendency to furnish cultural explanations for clearly political events, a tendency that can easily end in the complete rejection of politics as itself another "white cultural mode of change"...

[This assertion] also helps to point up the importance of the way culture is defined. The anthropological concept of culture as a people's total way of life, which has given rise to what Szwed calls the "cultural approach" to the study of society, is often confused with culture in the narrowed sense of accumulated ideas and techniques, transmitted for the most part in writing. That this confusion has become pervasive is suggested by the popular use of the term "life-style" to include everything from novels to the length of people's hair. One of its consequences is a growing disposition to regard culture in the more restricted sense—literary culture or "high culture"—not as potentially the common property of all men, but as something peculiarly bourgeois, white, or male, depending on the polemical frame of reference. The revolt against capitalism, racism, and the oppression of women becomes identified with a revolt against culture; or worse, the revolt against culture becomes a substitute for the revolt against capitalism, racism, and sexual exploitation.

Until recently, high culture was regarded, even by radicals—one is tempted to say, especially by radicals—not as the monop-
[195]
oly of any particular class or race but as mankind's inheritance. Gramsci once wrote:

In the accumulation of ideas transmitted to us by a millennium of work and thought there are elements which have an eternal value, which cannot and must not perish. The loss of consciousness of these values is one of the most serious signs of degradation brought about by the bourgeois regime; to whom everything becomes an object of trade and a weapon of war. The proletariat will have to take on the work of reconquest, to restore in full for itself and all humanity the devastated realm of the spirit.

Partly because the proletarian movement never successfully addressed itself to this task, we now find ourselves confronted with demands for cultural autonomy that confuse intellectual culture with bourgeois "life-styles" and reject the former along with the latter. The discovery that ethnic cultures (in the broad sense of the term "culture") have been unexpectedly resistant to homogenization coincides with, and to some extent may be informed by, a misguided and regressive rebellion against literary culture that seeks in the sentimental myth of the folk an antidote to bourgeois decadence. Were the political movements to which the scholarly rediscovery of ethnicity corresponds—movements for ethnic equality and self-determination—to adopt this primitivism as their own, they would then be adopting "irrelevant white cultural models" with a vengeance.

...

[196] The issue is not whether black people have a culture. In the essay already alluded to, the writer sets up a strawman, the contention that Afro-Americans have been "stripped" of their culture, and then proceeds to demolish it—incidentally with many asides to the effect that anyone who questions his own interpretation of the distinctiveness of black culture must be politically on the side of integration. But surely the question is no longer whether blacks have been "stripped" of their culture but whether the culture they do have is primarily African in origin or whether it has been formed in response to oppression in America, as the theorists of the "culture of poverty" have tried to show.

The history of Harlem helps to clarify this issue. As late as the twenties, even after the mass migration from the South had begun to be felt, Harlem retained a vigorous community life. It was at once more prosperous and more self-sustaining than it has since become. The collapse of the Negro artisan class, the Great Depression, the economic deterioration of New York City in general, and perhaps also the ideology of integration, combined to render Harlem vulnerable not only to economic but to cultural penetration from outside. It became an after-hours playground for whites looking for forbidden pleasures and hungry for soul. ...

Those who deny the pathological elements in the culture of poverty would do well to ponder Malcolm's account of his own degradation, in a world where high status meant a light skin, straight hair, the company of white women, and flashy clothes (manufactured by white merchants especially for the ghetto and sold at inflated prices). Relations between blacks and whites—sexual relations in particular—came to be founded on a pattern
[197]
of mutual fascination, exploitation, and degradation. The revival of black nationalism in the fifties and sixties, with its puritanical morality and its reassertion of the work ethic, was directed precisely against this kind of cultural "integration." It reflected an awareness that the two races had too long, and at too close range, witnessed each other's shame.

Unfortunately, this same nationalism proved unable to formulate an adequate politics. Like other black nationalist movements in the past, it advocated physical separation. At the same time it put forward a mythical view of the Negro past, which encouraged an escapist preoccupation with Africa. Neither at the political nor at the cultural level did it succeed in expressing the two-sidedness of the life of American blacks. For a time, it appeared that the black power movement of the mid-sixties would achieve a real unity, combining an emphasis on the distinctive elements in black culture with a struggle for power in American society as a whole. But this movement quickly split in two. The political wing propounds a new integrationism in the name of "Marxist-Leninism," while the cultural nationalists ignore politics altogether. Meanwhile, a new generation of academics had rediscovered popular culture as a field for scholarly research—and also, perhaps, as a way of resolving nagging doubts about their own relevance. The question, as I have already suggested, is whether this new scholarship will encourage a better understanding of the relations between modern technological society and the pre-industrial cultures it has partially absorbed, or whether it will merely surround poverty with the romantic glow of the intellectuals' own alienation. An appreciation of the resilience of pre-industrial culture could contribute, however indirectly, to the growth of a genuinely antitechnolgical politics. Romanticizing poverty, on the other hand, would merely prolong the present political stalemate and at the same time encourage a process of cultural "Balkanization"—a regression to a state of generalized ignorance disguised as ethnic pluralism and having as its political counterpart a system of repressive decentralization, combining "community control" of culture with centralized control of production, and a
[198]
colorful proliferation of "life-styles" with the underlying reality of class domination.

Lasch—Omnicompetence

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

According to Walter Lippman...the "omnicompetent citizen" was an anachronism in the age of specialization. In any case, most citizens, he thought, cared very little about the substance of public policy. The purpose of journalism was not to encourage public debate but to provide experts with the information on which to base intelligent decisions.
(p. 10)

(This "in opposition to John Dewey and other veterans of the progressive movement.")

Lippman's argument rested on a sharp distinction between opinion and science. Only the latter, he thought, could claim to be objective. ... This cult of professionalism had a decisive influence on the development of modern journalism. Newspapers might have served as extensions of the town meeting. Instead they embraced a misguided ideal of objectivity and defined their goal as the circulation of reliable information—the kind of information, that is, that tends not to promote debate but circumvent it. The most curious feature in all this, of course, is that although Americans are now drowning in information...surveys regularly report a steady decline in their knowledge of public affairs. In the "age of information" the American people are notoriously ill informed. ... They have become almost as incompetent as their critics have always claimed—a reminder that it is debate itself, and debate alone, that gives rise to the desire for usable information. In the absence of democratic exchange, most people have no incentive to master the knowledge that would make them capable citizens.
(pp. 11-12)

a misguided ideal of objectivity

the kind of information, that is, that tends not to promote debate but circumvent it

it is debate itself, and debate alone, that gives rise to the desire for usable information

All brilliant points.

The misguided ideal of objectivity also prevails, I think, in certain academic milieux. To be sure, academia is the place for it. There should always be some of this kind of academic work being done as a necessary safeguard against the total unmooring of discourse from its empirical foundations. But there are, nonetheless, many academic projects where the conceit to objectivity is counterproductive for precisely the reasons laid out by Lasch above; if many of these are one-off projects, nonetheless they collectively comprise a sizable chunk of academic turf. Further, it is always worth asking whether the rigidly objective academic posture has emerged organically from the task at hand or if it is a merely calculated piece of theater designed to give a certain impression to a certain audience for a certain self-interested reason.

The circumvent[ion] of debate by appealing to hard facts (which usually are just hard to verify) has a history worthy of its own book. Interestingly, Lasch begs an exemption for religion here, precisely where some of us (as he is aware) would think of it first.

Priding themselves ["devoutly open-minded intellectuals"] on their emancipation from religion, they misunderstand religion as a set of definitive, absolute dogmas resistant to any kind of intelligent appraisal. They miss the discipline against fanaticism in religion itself. The "quest for certainty," as Dewey called it, is nowhere condemned with such relentless passion as in the prophetic tradition common to Judaism and Christianity, which warns again and again against idolatry, the idolatry of the church included. Many intellectuals assume that religion satisfies the need for moral and emotional security—a notion that even a passing knowledge of religion would dispel.
(p. 90)

These are beautiful thoughts, but I can't help but think we have passed through incomplete evidence here, i.e. merely the worst of the "intellectuals" and the best of the "religious."

As for debate itself, this is so brilliant and so important, but damned if it is not also extremely unpleasant nowadays. Because we live in the age of information I have often found myself simply unable to engage (whether to agree or disagree hardly matters) with much of anyone too far outside my own political orientation, because their arguments, whether well-crafted or ill-constructed on the rhetorical level, so often invoke supporting evidence which I am entirely unable to evaluate for sheer lack of familiarity. Regular competence is elusive enough; omnicompetence feels unattainable. Human beings cannot become "omnicompetent" on any larger scale than the village. By affinity I am a big-city person to the bone, but on a purely rational level it is becoming ever more difficult to ignore this problem.

We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively—if we take it in at all.
(p. 163)



The attempt to bring others around to our own point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponents' arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it (as Lippman thought of it) as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents' minds—something that can happen only if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of thought and expression, and sound judgment. As Lippman noted, small communities are the classic locus of democracy—not because they are "self-contained," however, but simply because they allow everyone to take part in public debates.
(pp. 170-171)

We lose sight of this nowadays because we seem veritably surrounded by others' "views," hemmed in on all sides by them as it were. But perhaps the real story is how many people don't articulate anything in particular, perhaps because they have nothing to articulate, and moreover (as Lasch would have it here) because they don't have to.

Collins and Bilge—(Young) Bolsheviks in the Bathroom

Intersectionality (2016)
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

p. 167—schools as "important venues for youth activism," because "that's where they spend their time"

Indeed, they presently spend virtually all of their time there, which forces the channelization of all kinds of impluses into the School life, most of them only rather uncomfortably. This takes the longer-standing suspicion of youthful rebellion by adults and adds the more basic grounds for skepticism that so much such rebellion is so obviously of limited scope. The element of sequestration is, if not more pressing than the issues raised by Freire, certainly more basic and expansive. That is to say that even with an ideal "critical" education, no student can possibly develop evenly if they are sequestered. This has nothing to do with school failing to reflect the Real World; school should not reflect the Real World quite so thoroughly, but nor should students be holed up in one airless corner of it to the extent that the discussion of youth activism necessitates accounting for the peculiar form of their location. It is an unfortunate (and one hopes unintended) consequence of the focus on expanding access that this side of the discussion is more or less beyond the pale for most of the Left. What are we expanding access to? The fact that student activism has a sociological literature devoted to it is one big cue to ask that question.

[from a post-it, late 2017]

Collins and Bilge—Experience≠Evidence≠Theory

Intersectionality (2016)
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

p. 46—"...foregrounds the ways in which activism or experience shape knowledge, an insight that is often lost when theoretical approaches are institutionalized in the academy."

This is something of a false dichotomy, or at least a diversionary one. What both "experience" and "theory" suffer from, statistically speaking, is insufficient sample size. Hence the more technocratic, mainstream methodologies of Sociology proper typically involve a certain gathering of evidence before any conclusions are (or can be) drawn. It is true that this has historically been the site of myriad biases, usually toward Power and whatever groups hold it; but if that is so scary, just look at what an eerily similar conception of knowledge construction via "experience" currently prevails among the alt-right and the ways which it is called into service by them (e.g. D'Souza's "rational discrimination"). Can we really trust informal consortiums of like-minded activists to pool their experience and look for patterns with any meaningful degree of detachment? Probably no more than we can trust ivory tower theoreticians with no "experience" at all to create it in their proverbial laboratories. Scientific empiricism is hardly perfect, but IMHO it beats the pants off the other options, and I do find it conspicuous by its absence here.

[from a post-it, late 2017]

The Latest Unavoidable Editorial Notice

Periodically bloggers call a 30-second time out to step out of their virtual bodies and observe. Here we go again.

The consciously-stated guiding principles here (staying on topic, avoiding making myself part of the story, and overall continence in rate of production) have been stetched over the years, and they're being stretched to the breaking point now. Where to go from here? On the topical front, it no longer seems constructive (or even possible) for every post to relate directly/explicitly to music. Still, music is the focus. This can no longer be an editorial policy vis-a-vis content itself, but it is very much still true of the larger project. Everything here can still be read with this front of mind. If doing so makes a particular item seem especially farfetched or off topic, then that is your cue as the reader to keep searching for the connection. These are my intentions at least, and I am stating them. I won't tell anyone how to think. I used to read a lot of musicians' blogs and felt that in most of them there really was no such connection, nor much of anything else worthwhile. This I found frustrating in light of the obvious potential of the medium, and this frustration has informed my direction here. At this point I can forgive any reader who finds my insistence that music is still the focus to be insincere and/or meaningless. For me this focus is very much still there.

The quote-mania aspect needs to be addressed specifically. I realize that it is often unsightly on any number of levels. Specifically,

--things taken out of context will be misunderstood, rendered useless, etc.

--authority and/or proof will be implied where they should not be

--the reason for posting the excerpt (am I agreeing? disagreeing? bolstering myself? questioning myself? looking busy?) is not always transparent in absence of more (any) commentary

--there is an element of aggression, showboating, etc. in saying, essentially, hey everyone, look at me and how many obscure books I've read and taken notes on

I am aware of all of these dangers. For me, now, they are trumped by a deeply-felt need (the first rumblings were here) to ground my thinking (and action!) in something bigger than the peasant empiricism which previously prevailed here. I'm comfortable courting each of the above dangers in order to try to get at something better.

Biases and perversions are more than mere social deviancies. They also channel our attention in constructive ways. For every basic reality they cause us to overlook, there is a hidden (to others) reality which they cause us to notice. I do a lot of playing with rhetoric and verbiage, because I enjoy those things and we're allowed to have fun sometimes, but my ultimate aim here is to notice things, secure in the knowledge what is biased or perverted about my noticing sense is precisely what makes my observations worth sharing publicly. My end of the bargain is to also mix in some sources which compensate for my blind spots.

Some biographical details which may or may not explain my behavior as an adult:

--Sometime around eighth or ninth grade, I had a teacher assign us to write our homework assignment on an index card. Often teachers would merely suggest materials, but I remember that in this particular case the requirement that we use an actual fucking index card, as opposed to any other kind of paper product fashioned into index-card-like form, became non-negotiable and was factored into grading. I believe the conceit here was to condition high-level "academic" skills and organization, but I'm not sure. In any case, despite my father being a goddamned tenured college professor and my mother an exceptional salt-of-the-earth intellectual, despite the house being filled to the ceiling with intellectual artifacts both externally procured and internally generated, the proper index cards which this teacher considered to be as essential to academic production as the books themselves were not an item that our household typically kept in stock or would have any reason to. Without a car, before Amazon, and in a midwestern city that runs on farmer's hours, it was, odd as it sounds since this was not really that long ago, hardly the easiest thing in the world to acquire the cards in time for me to earn full credit on the assignment. Happily, Mom did eventually manage to locate an old supply of recipe cards, buried deep in the scratch-paper cupboard underneath the kitchen phone, lost among all manner of hoarded paper oddities (more on this later). I suspect the card was older than I was, perhaps even older than my teacher. It was college-ruled with very thick dark blue lines, which I found obnoxious. I suppose you could say we got through this together, a strong intellectual family weathering (this time) the tyranny of mediocrity which prevails in intellectual life and in every other kind of human institution. Memories change the more we access them, so some detail could be off here, but the point is that I recently started accessing this memory more often after realizing that I have spontaneously/organically lurched toward a maniacal-compulsive perversion of the index card theory of intellectual inventory management. The glib observation that students in more vulnerable home circumstances don't always receive these small pieces of support is VERY apt here, and it does make me viscerally angry, RIGHT NOW, as I type this, to think that small-minded bullshit like this is undoubtedly part of various Achievement Gaps that can indeed be placed at the doorsteps of the petit-bourgeois overachiever index-card class of college completers. I had GREAT teachers, actually, but this still happened, there was real trauma involved, and it pisses me off a lot because it's so unnecessary. I had to "unschool" for about a decade before I could function intellectually. At that point I started buying Post-Its and Moleskines by the case. No seriously, I spent almost $400 online on a case of Moleskines because single Moleskines are crazy overpriced at OfficeMax! I had to look really hard to find this, even on today's internet! This will only pay off if I eventually use them all! My mock-superstition is that when I fill the last page I will die! But at least I will die at my own hand rather than that of some small-minded bureaucrat.

--Sometime later in high school, when we had started writing pretty serious papers and shit, the bibliography bugbear really began to roar. My thoughts on this nowadays are basically the same as above, and my evolution has followed the same ironic path. The index card moment here was the time I found I had failed to harvest all of the bibliographical info I needed from a certain library book which had since been returned. I made a special bus trip downtown, found the book on the shelf, took down the info, and probably missed a couple of hours of sleep which undoubtedly will come off the end of my life. I never considered just fudging the info, never considered that as hard as it was for me to retrieve it so hard would it be for the teacher to check it, never considered that teachers (even the good ones) don't love grading papers, they just want their students to "get" the lesson. I did not need the lesson and was punished for it. By myself or by the teacher? Here is a good old liberal vs. conservative topic for talking-head debate! I wish this trip downtown had not happened, but I survived and have now lived long enough that it has shaped me in what I feel to be a constructive and meaningful way. Now the internet has made bibliographies both too easy and too difficult. Now it seems excessive, aggressive, showboaty, etc. to provide even the minimal bibliographical detail that I do here. But in my working notes I record ALL THE THINGS MOTHERFUCKERS, just like a GOOD FUCKING BUREAUCRAT, and then I FUCKING SIT ON THEM like a goddamned mother hen.

--My dear mother, of scratch-paper cupboard fame, has unfortunately never quite gotten her act together in the area of actual intellectual production. What she has done is filled the family home to the ceiling with her sources, refused to cull a single one of them until she has produced her masterwork, and then neglected to get on with it. I'm omitting lots of relevant details from this story. The point is, now that I know what this looks like, I reeeally don't want it to happen to me. I often receive books from LAPL which previous patrons have mutilated with notes, underlining, pages folded over, etc. Usually this is unobtrustive, but sometimes it's not. The first bell hooks book I got my hands on this way had had the entire final chapter ripped out; it must be really good or really bad! People have a thousand and one ways of avoiding the hard work of intellectual production, by which I mean not merely formal publication but rather ANY personal practice of intellectual synthesis. Passive consumption is fine too, but only if you are content with it. Contrary to the boat stabilization brigade (BSB), I think that few people really are content with it, and I wonder if every neatly folded page corner in a library book is not really a cry for help, a coping mechanism of high-functioning procrastinators (HFPs). Fucking write it down! At least take a fucking picture of it with your goddamned smartphone. DON"T JUST STAND THERE, DO SOMETHING! And do it NOW, while the spark is fresh. You can clean the toilet and shave your crotch tomorrow. This cannot wait. I made many blind lurches away from HFP without ever quite breaking free. It is a disease that you have to confront, and you may have to change your surroundings in order to be able to confront it. I finally stared it down for good in the CalArts library (yes, I came crying back to school one last time) when, having once again strapped myself to the railroad tracks of small-minded bureaucracy, I was required to produce program notes for my graduation recital. Instead of just blowing off empirical steam on my blog, I found that I could launch myself off of other authors like a missile. I could launch onto my desktop, into my email, or straight onto the 'net; I could unburden myself into stacks of Moleskines, index cards, stickie notes, or junk mail; I could post it, stick it, stack it, hoard it, or cull it; I could indulge in creative mutilation of books I own while respecting the sanctity of my community-of-choice's Clean Copy. Only pension-chasing crotch-grooming overachievers have absolute beliefs about which of these is The Way. What matters is that you strike while the iron is hot so that you can move on without fear of loss, so that your living space doesn't become a suffocating fire trap, and so that the few other people who give a fuck about the same things you give a fuck about don't have to smell your stale shit in every library book you've ever touched even though you scrape the shit off your toilet bowl faster than you can expel it from your body. You will retain more knowledge and less shit this way, rendering your prior productions inessential to your general ability to think, and therefore liberating yourself from fear of loss. If you are steadily improving yourself, your best production always lies ahead of you and your previous productions cannot dominate you by threatening to pass out of existence (as all our productions eventually will, it must be said). It's also fine to read with no prententions beyond the moment! But please don't let your unrealized pretensions kill you, not from the inside and not from the outside, and please don't project them onto shared community materials. We all have our own demons to grapple with and don't need yours staring back at us.

Quite unexpectedly, just as I was really starting to launch into this process, I got a full-time job. I was still able to read and record at about 70-80% of the previous rate, but eventually some "synthesis" beyond stream-of-consciousness notewriting needed to happen, and now there was no time for it. Though I was growing on the inside, I still felt headed for stifled hoarderism. And then of course, as jobs do, even more quickly than it had appeared it went away. This brings us more or less up to the present. From unschooling to unstifling.

For any readers here, the most important result of this to be aware of is that this blog has acquired a new function for me, hopefully in addition to those which it already served and not in place of them, but perhaps in place of them for yet-to-be-determined stretches of time. Namely, I want to gather as many of my virtual "index cards" as I can and begin organizing them by topic. Only time will tell whether this has been worth the trouble, but from where I stand (and I do stand at the computer, because I'm over six feet tall) some objectives seem obvious:

--when casual conversations turn uncasual, it's nice to have one's sources organized, available, and sharable anywhere via the information superhighway's most infamous vehicle

--though it seems unlikely that I'll ever do mainstream publication, I also won't rule it out, and so it's best to get organized now than later; why not do it here?

--many things I wrote previously really badly need to be fact checked, rethought, qualified, footnoted, bolstered, demolished, reiterated; or, less spectacularly, they need to be incrementally revised, deepened, fleshed out, balanced out, etc. I remain committed to avoiding revision of the old posts themselves wherever possible, such that the blog remains an honest and true document of my thinking in particular moments, even when this thinking now strikes me (and could strike others!) as quite wrong. Rather, any "post" can now also become a "thread," living and dead at the same time. From an intellectual perspective I find this a very intriguing (mis)use of the basic blog architecture, a use for which said architecture is made worse and not better by the vicious McLuhanization which has now maimed every other online medium that might have served similar purposes. The comment functionality here is actually much more awkward than a shoebox full of index cards! The crotch-trimmers get some poetic justice! Yet this awkwardness can also be, to conjure a precious faux-deviant academicism, reclaimed as a generative strategy. Hence I am sticking with Blogger for as long as Blogger will stick with me!

Regarding the flimsiness of the sources themselves, I must beg forgiveness and patience. I started with psychoanalysis because it seemed to be underlying (often explicitly but not always) most of the assumptions about art that I wanted to work towards refuting. What I found instead is, first of all, that holders of said assumptions cannot possibly have actually read or understood any of the seminal psychoanalytic writers. Secondly, I found that works which are ultimately completely crazy and wrong can still be quite edifying, and that certainly they can help to explain "intellectual history" even if they hold little water otherwise. Third, I believe I also found that psychoanalysis is not totally full of shit, even if it is mostly full of shit. These three points apply equally to my second major reading project, Guy Debord and the Situationists. Again, forgiveness and patience please. I had been involved in a performance which claimed to take Situationist "psychogeography" as one of its inspirations. The architect of this monstrosity has either not read or not in the least understood the Situationists. But I only suspected that. I had to confirm it on my own. In book time, this confirmation is costly and comes slowly. I'm sure it would be more ideal to have Marx, Habermas, or Bourdieu under my belt by now. These have long seemed, from a distance as it were, like urgent oeuvres for this tuba player to encounter. Yet no one in my working life was making them quite so urgent. I have decided to make daily necessity my guide. This is a thoroughly reactive rather than proactive posture, which I hate in principle, but it does ensure motivation and purpose, and even, dare I say it, some direct quotidian applications of some very academic ideas. The next themed investigation relates to my job, and it's under wraps until that situation resolves itself. If you think these are intellectually trifling bodies of work that I have thus far worked though, you simply will not believe what this latest one ended up being! But the same three discoveries apply, and this time they reflect more poorly on my own people than on my opponents. Around the edges there have been some side projects (how I despise that term) which relate only distantly to these themes. And eventually, for balance, there came a period of free-for-all, in which we currently find ourselves. All of which is to say that this has not unfolded in any kind of intellectually logical or ideal way. That's life. It doesn't always work for the logic to come first. My sincere hope is that the logic might emerge, eventually, from the emergent, ever-sprawling Fickle Ears.

Parsons on the Romantic and the Methodical

...the dominant character structure of modern Germany had been distinguished by a striking dualism between "A: an emotional, idealistic, active, romantic component which may be constructive or destructive and anti-social," and "B: an orderly, hard-working hierarchy preoccupied, methodical, submissive, gregarious, materialistic" component.

In the traditional pre-Nazi German society it is overwhelmingly the B component which has become institutionalized. The A component arises from two principal independent sources: certain features of the socialization process in the German family, and the tensions arising from life in that type of institutional order. It is expressed in romantic, unrealistic emotionalism and yearnings. Under other circumstances the dissociation has historically been radical–the romantic yearning has found an outlet in religion, art, music and other-worldly, particularly a-political, forms. (248)

...

The peculiarity of the Nazi movement is that it has harnessed this romantic dynamism to an aggressive, expansionist, nationalistic political goal–and has utilized and subordinated all the motives behind the B component as well. In both cases the synthesis has been dependent at the same time on certain features of the situation and on a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols. The first task of a program of institutional change is to disrupt this synthesis and create a situation in which the romantic element will again find an a-political form of expression. This will not, however, "cure" the basic difficulty but only its most virulent and, to the United Nations, dangerous manifestation. (248-249)

Talcott Parsons
"The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change" (1945)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 238-274

Note (4 June, 2016): This resonates strongly with my conception of the aesthetic realm as, at minimum, a "padded cell" for various human impulses to inhabit without being enabled to do real damage (or, it is fair to add, make improvements) to the "real"/outside world. It would, of course, be great if in the first place there was not so much inner destructiveness flowing from human beings out into the world that we needed a special reservoir just to drain it off. I don't know that TP's discussion here anywhere near fully accounts for that. Even so, it is also not to be assumed a priori, as some postmodern Critical Theorists seem eager to do, that pure/absolute aestheticism is so inherently destructive in and of itself. As TP describes it here, the Nazi synthesis of "A" and "B" was an unusual and unlikely achievement, and one that could be disrupted precisely by recreating an apolitical space for romanticism to inhabit. And so, has the American academic left not been working quite diligently since the 1960s at forging and promoting just such a synthesis between industriousness (i.e. activism) and romanticism (i.e. art and aesthetics), accompanied by "a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols?" Hate to say it, but I think that description fits almost perfectly. Perhaps the antidote is also the same.

Note (23 April, 2021): I know that you're never, ever supposed to liken anyone to the Nazis. At the same time, such a taboo effectively limits what we are allowed to learn from history. Obviously there are many, many more differences than similarities here. That caveat should be superfluous, but I realize that in the present environment it is not. The point is that here we have one single instance of an influential speculative thinker offering up the speculation that art and politics make for an explosive combination. This seems to me very much worth considering in light of current events all over the political spectum. Perhaps we cannot learn much here, but surely we can learn something.

Parsons on the Instrumental and the Expressive

If we are right in thinking that special pressures operate on the younger generation relative to the general pressures generated by social change, on the other side of the relationship there are factors which make for special sensitivities on their part. The residua of early dependency, as pointed out above, constitute one such factor. In addition, the impact on youth of the general process of social differentiation makes for greater differences between their position and that of children, on the one hand, and that of adults, on the other, than is true in less differentiated societies. Compared to our own past or to most other societies, there is a more pronounced, and above all (as noted) an increasingly long segregation of the younger groups, centered above all on the system of formal education. It may be argued especially that the impact of this process is particularly pronounced at the upper fringe of the youth period, for the rapidly increasing proportion of the age cohort engaged in higher education–in college, and, very importantly, in postgraduate work. These are people who are adults in all respects except for the element of dependency, since they have not yet attained full occupational independence (172)

...

What I have called the romantic trend can be broadly expressed in two directions; the tentative terms "regressive" and "progressive" are appropriate, if not taken too literally. ...the former, at social levels, tending to resist change, the latter to anticipate and promote it.

...The cult of physical prowess [e.g. athletics] has clearly been a reflex of the pressure to occupational achievement in a society in which brains rather than brawn come increasingly to count. From this point of view, it is a regressive phenomenon. (175)

...

On the other side, the progressive one, the most important phenomena are most conspicuous at the upper end of the range, both in terms of the sociocultural level and of the stage of the life cycle. This is the enormous development of serious cultural interests among students in the more elite colleges. The most important field of these interests seems to be that of the arts, including highbrow music, literature, drama, and painting.

The first essential point here is that this constitutes a very definite upgrading of cultural standards, compared with the philistinism of the most nearly corresponding circles in an earlier generation. Second, however, it is at least variant and selective (though not, I think, deviant) with respect to the main trends of the society, since the main developments in the latter are on the "instrumental" rather than the "expressive" side. As to the special involvement of elite youth in the arts, it may be said that youth has tended to become a kind of "loyal opposition" to the main trends of the culture, making a bid for leadership in a sphere important to balanced society yet somewhat neglected by the principal innovating agencies. (176)

Talcott Parsons
"Youth in the Context of American Society" (1962)
in Social Structure and Personality, pp. 155-182

Note (12 May, 2016):
So, among the "romantic," "progressive" elements of youth culture, the arts present a sort of path of least resistance, an opening created by the slippage between society's stated valuation of the arts on one hand and its material/actual devaluation of them on the other. The arts are both socially acceptable and (TP explicitly denies it, but I would not) in some sense also deviant. Further, as TP perceptively identifies here, the source of the arts' deviant tinge is the broader trend of society in the "instrumental" direction at the direct expense of "expressive" concerns. Rapid change of this type creates anomic strain, which feeds youthful romanticism (the "unreality" component TP identifies elsewhere with "romanticism" is very apt here too). Even so, the "elite," "progressive" elements of youth culture, while they are not immune to romanticism and unreality, are still of their own volition bound to common social values and norms; hence, their brand of "youth culture" is merely "loyal opposition" rather than out and out rebellion. TP only IMPLIES that this "loyalty" is a direct and predictable product of this youth's socialization as "elite." He doesn't actually say so, at least not here. But isn't it obvious that those born "elite" have an awfully tough time later admitting that the society which delivered them to such privilege does not treat all people equally or equitably? IMHO, this is an important explanation for the "loyalty" of their "opposition" to a society which they inevitably, be it consciously or unconsciously, come to understand as fundamentally inequitable. The dialectical ring of the term "loyal opposition" is a reflection of the unresolved inner guilt which underlies it. So, it's true, TP has perhaps underemphasized the elements of class conflict here, choosing instead to conduct distinct analyses of the "regressive" and "progressive" elements. I would say that this approach is "incomplete" without being out-and-out "flawed." In fact, this is a brilliant take on the explosive escalation of post-secondary arts education that was just beginning to take shape as he was writing. VERY perceptive.

---

Kluckhohn, among others [The Evolution of Contemporary American Values, 1958], comments on the current expansion in America of aesthetic and expressive activities "greatly beyond mere 'comfort.' Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] calls attention to the concern with taste in the widespread sophistication about food and dress. We suggest that this rise in aesthetic appreciation, in hedonism, if you will, is not merely an effort to establish new criteria of status through marginal differentiation but mainly a heightened expressiveness–complementary to, rather than conflicting with, a rise in instrumental demands for achievement. (229)

"The Link Between Character and Society"
(with Winston White) (1961)
ibid, pp. 183-235

19 April, 2021: In other words, this "expansion" of "aesthetic and expressive activities" is compensatory and equilibriating in a world where the "main developments" have for long been "on the 'instrumental' rather than the 'expressive' side." The idea is facile. Probably it is all but untestable scientifically. But there is lots of anecdotal evidence for it, and it holds great explanatory power.

Career Designs: Relative and Absolute Privilege, and the Even Keel

I seldom go long between social encounters with laypeople bent on idealizing my career choice on my behalf, the customary remark being something about "following your passion." Needless to say that my peers and colleagues are rarely quite so saccharine when discussing music as a vocation. The combined effect of these contradictory expressions can be disorienting, though to be sure they both betoken a familiar grass-is-always-greener outlook as well as the facility with which we can put either face on things, not just in our various interfaces with outsiders but also in our own minds. That is, we may reason relatively, as the layperson tends to (think Symphony Tubist vs. Ice Road Trucker), or we may present our real situation (statistically speaking, probably not anything like Symphony Tubist nor anything approaching it) in absolute terms.

There are good reasons for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to keep sight of the relative sense, if not merely to avoid saying something that they might later regret. But if The Arts so broadly construed are thought to have even the slightest objective social utility, then there is, dare I say, a reciprocal imperative on the extra-artistic world to keep sight of the absolute sense in which the vast majority of artists one can expect to meet face-to-face are dealing with much the same mixed bag of joys and sorrows that any committed professional does.

For me, music certainly has proven a potent avenue through which to learn that sources of great joy are uniquely suited to pile on great heaps of sorrow, and are typically also quite happy to oblige. This is a Life Lesson with implications beyond the narrow concerns of any one profession, yet I doubt that someone who has never truly devoted themselves to a calling can meaningfully understand it, particularly because it is a profoundly dualistic statement whose reverse does not hold: sources of great sorrow, as a group, are not particularly likely to also be sources of great joy. There is something in there about the wretchedness of the human condition, I think, but that is another topic for another time. More to the point is that the irreversibility of this fundamental vocational principle is what causes so much of our dialogue with outsiders to remain rhetorically anchored in the notion of relative privilege. To posit this relative privilege as a defining characteristic of artisthood, however, is to commit three related errors: first, by obfuscating its non-exclusivity to The Arts; second, by defining The Arts via what they are not; and third, by failing to account for the fact that this roller-coaster ride of privilege and obligation is quite a bit more than the sum of its parts.

Indeed, this latter reality is why so many of us academy-trained creatives were at some point told by an institutionally-sanctioned mentor not to get "too high or too low." If we were in fact told this, then we were, for one thing, fortunate to have fished out of the academic miasma at least one person who knew what they were talking about, and this in spite of their own relatively privileged position in the selfsame anti-meritocracy which we ourselves ostensibly aspired to enter. This much we may even have realized at the time. Less apparent back then, in all likelihood (and ever more so with "privilege" in seemingly perpetual ascendance as a watchword) was that we were being asked to withdraw from the relative into the absolute, to set our own standards for success rather than triangulating based on the messages being sent to us by the external social world; all of which is to say that every degree of failure to meet these internally-generated standards which is occasioned by an external factor makes it that much harder to swallow the more strident critiques of bourgeois art currently in circulation.

I am certain that my musical mentors were also correct in advising that "You get out of it what you out into it," and I expect that this is a less controversial statement than the one immediately preceding it. Precisely because this is such good advice in all areas of human endeavor, non-initiates of virtually any stripe getting a rare window in on the artist's habitus are bound to fixate on what appears to them as a conspicuous lack of either putting-in or getting-out. In fact you can't even admit to other musicians that you're not available for any reason other than that you already have a gig, and especially not if the real reason is that you've blocked out time to get out of public view and hone your craft. Suffice it to say that I speak from experience on this point. It is a phenomenon which, again, speaks to many larger human concerns which ought not be dredged up in too much detail right this minute. Even if you're not a professional artist, you can probably relate an analogous situation that you've faced, and if so, then perhaps you've also caught yourself thinking that privilege is a more complicated concept than the lowest common denominator of armchair theorists is capable of giving it credit for.

---
Time has a strong existential claim to being the most valuable personal resource, but I for one, millenial that I am, find focus per se to be the scarcest of all, which conventionally and practically speaking makes it the most valuable too. Hence the focus here on what I am calling the even keel. The advent of leisure time has an unimpeachable place in the study of history whereas the subset focused time remains incomprehensibly decadent even to some career academics. Hence the external social pressure to self-flagellate at the altars of myriad political interest groups is thrown into higher relief by the question of focus than by that of time even though the latter speaks to more basic political issues.

For the artist, this pressure creates palpable tension with an outside world which in spite of its boggling diversity of political orientation and worldview is seemingly quite unified in its intent to define art and artists relatively rather than absolutely. I have to think that anyone reading this can readily conjure the vastly different versions of infinite regress that, say, Bernie People and Trump People can be counted upon to summon in this respect. The region along this spectrum where inhabitants risk being accused of harboring an unseemly "relativism" is rather small and remote, yet there is, at the minimum, relativistic thinking in evidence both in the soft-Marxist critique of bourgeois art and in the contemporary red-state contempt for Artsy-Fartsies as against red-blooded, mammal-eating Americans. Both rhetorics cherrypick small differences and explode them into full-blown deviance. There is as well a characteristic distrust of the abstract and the unmeasurable which is a defining feature of the era of sclerotic institutions. (Hey arts non-profit people, can you say "measurable outcomes?") I would love to convince myself that these are essential mechanisms of social accountability upon which artists can profitably draw both in the content of their work and the living of their lives. What I actually stand convinced of is that this relativistic streak is merely a low-stakes commission of several deadly sins with which we are all familiar no matter what we do for a living.

That is to say that those who would accuse me of "following my passion" seem to be saying as much about themselves as about me. If they were merely expressing support or admiration, I suspect the wording of choice would be rather different; and of course if they knew what I actually have done for money over the years and how much of it has had nothing to do with music, they might have bitten their tongues altogether. It is just as easy for me to lapse into idealizing the many other fields I could have gone into; but alas, whereas enabling a select group of artists to live as solid middle-class earners has been an enduring project of the actual institutional bourgeoisie, the rise of the gig economy perversely relegates a great many others to live as only artists used to. Here as always, then, the term "professional" is used literally, reluctantly, and advisedly. Nihilism is the ultimate even keel, especially as human suffering becomes ever more visible; hence no "professional" milieu will ever lack for nihilists. As in most every other respect, The Arts are neither immune from nor especially exemplary of this reality.

Opposites Day Every Day

As I heedlessly forge ahead with the transformation from well- to over-educated, it occurs to me that there is great irony in having pursued musicianship within academia and scholarship outside of it. Even as the "mature" one, it would have taken unusual foresight and diligence for my 17 year-old self to fully grasp the tradeoffs lurking in each box of this unholy Punnett square. At 34, meanwhile, I have become a bit more conversant in such matters, and while superficially "the grass is always greener," in reality I'm thankful for and secure in my identity as a disciplined musician + free-wheeling scholar. In fact I'm tempted go even further than that: it's hard not to view both postures as necessary correctives to some troubling larger trends, and as such I'm hard-pressed to conjure any substantive regrets about the methodologies I've stumbled into.

Moderating the Tyranny of Specialism

If there is such a thing academically/intellectually as a "young (wo)man's game," the question for those of us so enmeshed becomes: why continue to specialize in middle age?

Galenson's thesis in Old Masters and Young Geniuses supports this thinking. "Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find," the latter at surprisingly young ages and often never again. Hence, no matter what we've found (or not) as an adolescent, perhaps middle age is our cue to start seeking.

Put another way, it is interesting to consider whether there are discernible landmarks of achievement lying afield of Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Where in the outer reaches of the life cycle might they fall? And what, then, about the relative worth of, say, 50,000 hour mastery in comparison to a broadening of horizons 500 hours at a time? Perhaps the latter might enable the 10,000 hour master to apply his or her already-substantial achievement to a wide range of immediate, human problems; and indeed, to better understand of his or her own accord what exactly constitutes an immediate, human problem in the first place? I will always be the first to make room for supreme achievers in the Bach or Coltrane mold, but I have had to accept that I am simply not wired for that path.

Glenn Gould famously blurted out something that every music teacher has thought to themselves when he remarked that he could explain everything about playing the piano in a half-hour while the student could spend the rest of his or her life applying this knowledge. Certainly 10,000 hours of practice sounds like a good minimum target for aspiring Professors of Applied Music seeking to unpack the technical and historical vicissitudes of their respective instrumental traditions; it is also wholly inadequate when it comes to mastering the composition, delivery, and contextualization of their own half-hour lectures. And so it must not be regarded as a mere formality, as it seems to have been throughout much of American academia for a very long time, that the latter and not the former is what these Professors are *actually* paid to do. Clearly some extra seasoning is in order; and if simply having Life Experiences® was all it took, every washed up conservatory brat would be magically transformed into a master teacher the moment their teenage child(ren) became sufficiently angsty to impose some long-overdue introspection. There would be middle-aged gurus in designer workout clothes falling from proverbial trees. We can only wish it were that simple.

Anecdotally, I have seen many peers (and myself) become increasingly unable to sustain the multi-hour instrumental practice regimen of college music school into early middle age. Those of us who at least met the barest of curricular time-banking expectations along the way and have continued to find smidges of focused practice time on a daily basis eventually backed into rather than charged into the 10,000 hour club, with all of its privileges and obligations, and with no hope of ever reaching whatever further thresholds might exist in the Gladwellian great beyond. When this first became apparent to me I took it as a serious blow to my self-esteem, committed as I was for many years to an intense practice regimen at the expense of virtually every other facet of personal development. I wanted to be a 50,000 hour tubamaster, or at least I had tried very hard to convince myself that I did. Further, though my hands now covered my face, I couldn't help peeking through my fingers at peers for whom the onset of Real Life® seemed to mark not just the end of their musical development but their personal development as well. It was both a shock and a relief to emerge from such twenty-something doldrums to find that my own desire for personal development had not abated along with my inclination to prioritize tuba playing over all else; and so I decided to listen to what my brain and body alike were trying to tell me: "You're already a specialist, and unless you throw your horn off a bridge, you'll always be one. Now go make it your own."

Just as most all of the principal players of the 20th century's greatest orchestras would fail to advance beyond today's preliminary round auditions on account of their individuality, so too would the areas in which many of history's greatest minds made their lasting contributions today be considered "beyond their competence" on account of vulgar credentialism's logic of accountability. To be clear, I do believe that membership in the 10,000 hour club is a necessity, and that eclecticism is a decidedly members-only area. But given that this number is pursued in a timely enough fashion for its own inner logic to hold, there ought to be plenty of life left during which to find a balance that meets your needs and fits your budget. So get to it.

[sc]airquotes (vi)

"The Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, a coalition of business and education leaders and policy makers, found, for example, that education in dance, theater, music, and the visual arts helps instill the curiosity, creativity, imagination, and capacity for evaluation that are perceived as vital to a productive U.S. work force. And the Conference Board, an international business-research organization, polled employers and school superintendents, finding that creative problem-solving and communications are deemed important by both groups for an innovative work force. Additionally, IBM, in a 2010 report based on face-to-face interviews with more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide, concluded that 'creativity trumps other leadership characteristics' in an era of relentless complexity and disruptive change."

Sunil Iyengar and Ayanna Hudson
Who Knew? Arts Education Fuels the Economy
Chronicle of Higher Education
10 March, 2014


Has anyone who conducts these studies or writes these articles ever tried to get a job armed with an arts degree?

Exchange with Milo Fine (vii): "fuck prejudice!"

[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv) – (v) – (vi)]

[SK] Just one thought this time, regarding the academy broadly construed: I am (finally) reading the George Lewis book about the AACM, and in light of our last installment, it's intriguing to consider how many of these musicians, to say nothing of their more "inside" but also-innovative peers and elders around the country, spent time, musical and otherwise, in the military. This is not just to ponder the impact of military culture on their subsequent activities, but also that they possessed the requisite "inside" chops at early stages in their musical development. On top of that, if not because of it, there seems to have been very little scorched-earth modernism at work among this assemblage, no matter how strongly a few unperceptive contemporary critics may have thought they detected it; there is even mention in the book of the fundamentals of Western music theory being enthusiastically taught in the early AACM educational program. So, I suppose it's too bad I didn't actually listen to any of this music sooner; aesthetically, at least, I feel like I come from a similar place (a blessing and a curse alike, I suppose, in that it's not quite so radical a place anymore).

Good points/observations all. I knew this about the AACM, but hadn't thought of it in quite a while. (However, what's interesting in this regard is the nature of some of their early work. Listen, for instance, to Anthony Braxton's brilliant FOR ALTO. Talk about raw and unfettered!) The same thing held true for the first wave of Brit improvisors. Paul Rutherford, John Stevens and Trevor Watts met when they were in the Royal Air Force music school, which, as Martin Davidson astutely puts it in his liner note to the Spontaneous Music Ensemble CD reissue[s] of CHALLENGE was "a relatively painless and cheap way of getting a technical music education." (Indeed, my dad used his already established musicianship to gain playing experience while in the army. And it helped him to avoid some of the usual bullshit to boot.) And this gets us back to that self-serving canard: "You gotta know the rules before you break 'em." I say this is self-serving because it creates a more or less single path to finding one's voice; to creativity.

As I stated previously, as evidenced by the wonderful music created by folks having gone down this road, it is certainly a viable path. But, naturally (and again), that has as much (if not more) to do with the resolve of the individual to utilize their education to their creative advantage than the aforementioned canard. The reason I somewhat unfairly state "canard" is the fact that, in almost every endeavor, this "rule" is erected as a barrier in order to create a set of values which insulates those who have chosen to go that route; something to hide (their own weaknesses &, perhaps lack of resolve/initiative) behind. This is also why, generally speaking, and no matter how creative, articulate and accomplished they might be, someone without academic credentials is generally not allowed to teach in the academy. (If universities gave these people jobs it might expose the fact that the emperor has no clothes, or, at least fewer than one initially thought!) Similarly, when I tried my own divorce decades ago (that marriage being a short, wrong-headed union if there ever was one!), I was last on the docket. I asked someone -- perhaps the court officer -- why that was, and he told me that the legal system didn't want to broadcast the fact that a basic divorce could be done without the "benefit" of a lawyer. (Just think of all the lawyer's fees that wouldn't be collected!) On the other hand, of course, being an autodidact doesn't guarantee anything either. As I'm wont to intone, something akin to genuine creativity is in the hands of the individual practitioner, regardless of background. The (A) point is not to disregard the autodidact; what he/she brings to the table, out-of-hand. Fuck prejudice!

Exchange with Milo Fine (vi): "a desolate marketplace"

[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv) – (v)]

[SK] I think there are many shades of grey on the autodidacticism spectrum.

[MF] Certainly. But, generalizations have their place in a discussion.

My own music-educational path was such a hodge-podge of chance occurrences and missed "opportunities" that I typically hesitate to place myself squarely in either the autodidactic or academy-trained camp.

I would say you're definitely more "academy" than autodidact; even if you didn't fully pick up your jazz chops as a result of the former.

[Milo adds later: And I should make it clear, pursuant to your point about "shades of autodidacticism", that, in terms of an "autodidact", I am not referring to someone who learns accepted/traditional technique/theory without the benefit of formal training, but, rather someone who charts and explores a path of unorthodoxy. (Keeping in mind, of course, that *everything* is, to shamelessly, if reasonably quote an LP title of mine, the constant extension of inescapable tradition.)]

I've often had the thought that my early and frequent exposure to classical music "in the house," as they say, bears more responsibility for my middlebrow tastes than any post-secondary academic molding, but then again, you yourself come from yet more intense classical music parentage than I do and you turned out very differently.

A matter of processing. And, to be clear, my parentage was *much* more jazz than classical. My dad was a jazz drummer who happened to fall into a "career" with the Minnesota Orchestra (or, as it was known then, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra). As a kid living in the first ring suburbs, I walked around the house singing "Salt Peanuts" rather than some aria. (And what I most heard around the house as time went on -- and my dad played less records -- was middle-of-the-road AM radio.)

In any case, while I'm no apologist for a musico-academic establishment with which I myself have had at best a strained relationship, given that most students in this country don't actually enter "the academy" until they are nearly 20 years old, I often wonder if it's too easy to blame their schooling for any and all personal shortcomings (or, for that matter, attributes) they may arrive and depart with intact?

The academy is a sort of early end-point; a matter of a more or less natural progression: orchestra in elementary, junior high and high school; often augmented with private lessons. A continuum.

A mutual acquaintance of ours once expressed near-disbelief that someone with my interests and outlook could also be someone who previously spent 4 years at the U of MN School of Music. What's actually amazing, I guess, is not that I went but that I stayed; in hindsight, though, it's clear to me that it was the previous 17 years of my life, though a decidedly mixed bag in their own right, which had prepared me to jump through all the requisite hoops while nonetheless continuing down my own path relatively unencumbered.

As I mentioned before, one *can* get something out of the academy without it subsuming them. It takes some conscious effort not to buy into all the values/sub-texts endemic of an institution.

Similarly, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the U doesn't have to close its students' minds for them; the bulk of them more or less show up that way.

That's what I was getting at previously. Everything's set. This is just the next logical step in drinking the kool-aid.

The situation at CalArts is not as bad, but it's hardly as good as it could/should be given the school's mission, history, and (dis)orientation. (It was at least entertaining to see the tables turned, with the conservatory brats pretending to tolerate the notion of free improvisation purely to avoid rocking the boat; opposites day every day!) In both cases, it was clear to me that while the institutions certainly could do more, there's no guarantee any of it would, shall we say, resonate with those at which it might be directed. A good deal of that work is done, or not, earlier on.

Exactly.

Incidentally, the notion of ultimately "becoming one's own best teacher" is a mainstream one in musico-academia, perhaps yet another co-optation, but one without much of a downside that I can see.

That's an ideal, and a good one. (When I was teaching drums, I almost always told students that the best I could contribute to their growth was to teach them to teach/motivate themselves.) The problem is that most people don't have the wherewithal/fortitude/discipline to take that path. Much easier to listen to lectures, read assignments, regurgitate information, get decent grades, network, and get a job. True individual initiative, is like wisdom: in short supply; or as Blake put it, "...sold in a desolate marketplace where none come to buy".

Your point about the blues is well-taken, but not exactly what I was getting at. I guess I have been involved in a handful of "improvised" situations over the years where one or more people in the ensemble were clearly and unabashedly searching to establish a structure (i.e. a vamp and/or chord progression). Stated in terms of our present conversation, their aesthetic is that of the status quo through and through, and they use "free" settings simply as additional opportunities to express it.

This point certainly resonates with me. It's too, too true. The flip side is throwing in some "free" (atonal) bits as seasoning (spice); more or less just to show one is accomplished (hah!) in that realm as well.

One has to think that what you're describing with the blues was more viable among groups of players for whom that form was/is both widely shared and occupied, for lack of a better way of putting it, a "special place" in the culture. I was thinking more about motherfuckers fumbling around with their heads up their asses until they can find each other in a rather arbitrarily chosen common key and meter, whereupon they will inevitably mire themselves ever deeper until the whole thing falls apart again. The blues is a much more flexible and varied form which, depending on your taste, can tolerate anywhere from a little to a lot more give and take, whereas the harmonic practice of so much mainstream classical, jazz, and rock music is, in the grand musical/sonic scheme, profoundly limited (usually a consequence of its being rooted in "vertical" rather than "horizontal" thinking).

Ah, you misunderstand what I meant vis a vis "the blues". I meant the basic 3 chord structure; readily communicated and understood. Once introduced, everyone can get on board. (Sigh of relief!) A basic foundation before resorting to the "I Got Rhythm" changes.

It's difficult to express all of this without sounding like just the kind of person I'm writing against.

You don't sound like that at all, at least to me.

The one time I really tried to turn someone on to the Improvised Music aesthetic, his response as I recall was something like, "Cool, we'll improvise one this set, but none of that [makes funny noises with mouth] shit, okay?"

What a predictable cretin!

So, again, there's always more to it, no?

Always! Or, in any case there *should*, no, *must* be.

Exchange with Milo Fine (v): "the wherewithal to examine it ruthlessly"

[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv)]

[SK] You're absolutely correct that versatility has been co-opted, and in quite a counterproductive way. I have sat through many a guest artist lecture during which the purely practical value of a wide ranging musical skill set has been expounded. There is, potentially, one minor positive aspect to this as musical academia continues hurtling down the "hire education" abyss, which is that it pokes a nice big hole in the narrow focus (too narrow for its own good, probably, even for the sake of true believers) that has traditionally prevailed there. Being driven by pragmatism and only negligibly by artistic concerns, however, undermines from the start what little hope this development brings with it.

[MF] Yes, in order to remain viable, the academy has to take in, analyze, dilute and regurgitate; even as much of what it vomits up pursuant to something like art in the purest sense doesn't have a practical application, and thus is at odds with what has become the academy's primary function. This would, in part, explain why the possibilities touched on by early free jazz musicians (or, earlier, Dadaists) were inevitably jettisoned, not only by the academy, but by musicians and listeners too. I'm talking about exploring pathways into the music that weren't dependent upon established approaches/dogma. But, what has happened, of course, is that these stylings were essentially dismissed as second-rate when unfairly and unreasonably compared to the inevitable emphasis on traditional virtuosity (extending into extended techniques [wordplay intended]). Of course, that hasn't prevented some of us from heading down those barely lit paths anyway. (As an example, I was delighted when, several years ago, friend and colleague Charles Gillett -- who is a highly accomplished autodidact in his own right -- turned me on to the band Aerosol Pike [Philip Mann/Ryan Reber/Rick Ness] with whom we've both collaborated. As I've said to you and others, these guys sound like they were lifted from the late 60s free jazz scene and transplanted here and now; like listening to a living ESP-Disk. But what's amazing, and I think gives their work a hearty resonance, is the fact that while free jazz influenced them, they didn't study and mimic autodidact players from that era. Rather, as I understand it, their music naturally evolved from an avant-garde rock based aesthetic. Not surprisingly, there was *no* issue with you, an academy-trained musician, being able to find common ground with them; or Charles for that matter. And this speaks to the notion of an openness to embrace another, equally valid point of view.) Curiously, however, having, I think, much to do with my focus and determination, I have, on occasion in reviews, nonetheless been termed a virtuoso.

Actually, I believe one can see rather clearly the seed of music's outright destruction as a post-secondary academic subject contained in the inability of any one musician, scholar, or institution to adequately deal with the full range of currently academically acceptable musics, to say nothing of the outliers. Gradually, I think we are having to accept that the needs of all of these students are too different from each other, and that there isn't really any core curriculum of a manageable size which can unify them. Not that people won't try, but it's only going to keep looking more and more ridiculous. Eventually, even the trustees, donors, and administrators will be people who didn't necessarily grow up believing that nineteenth century orchestral music deserves to be prioritized over all other forms.

I think here we have to examine the agendas of everyone involved; most of which have little to do with the essence of what is termed "art". Granted there are professors and students who retain the semblance of a resonant core, using the academic setting to further their individual quest, and more power to them! Glean something from the material itself and fuck the faux value system which surrounds it.

Probably the thing I was most curious about leading up to the Improvised Music workshop we co-led for WBSM was how you would position yourself, so to speak, seeing that there is a certain pluralistic aspect to how you work, but that you also have very high standards, the latter implying a role for judgment/taste/
determinacy/willfulness that more than a few improvisors of your generation (in)famously dispensed with. I laughed pretty hard to myself when you said that a certain pattern got "obnoxious" after a period of time; it was a pointed but diplomatic way of expressing an aesthetic position.

Well, that was "true" for that moment, that context, and also pursuant to the, what?, feeling behind what was being played. (Again, one can develop a sensibility to hone in on such things. Not that one is, thankfully, ever 100% correct, but, enough to provide insight into what might lie behind the work.) So, at another moment, another context, and with a different feeling, I wouldn't have made such an observation. (And, in any case, I would always be open to being challenged on any assessment!)

And yet...so many musicians are pattern/groove players. In pure pluralism, that's what they'd bring to a collaboration.

Which, even while painfully predictable, is not necessarily a counterproductive thing. The problem is that it's a default, a habit, and thus serves to prevent creativity coming to the fore.

The issue is whether one can recognize and challenge such defaults; phrasing them differently, breaking them up, shutting the fuck up, abandoning them, etc. But this takes conscious effort/thought, and, as we've touched on here, too many musicians don't see that as a vital aspect of free improvisation. And, even if they do, don't have the wherewithal to examine it ruthlessly and get out of their comfort zone. (And, perhaps return to it at some point from a different and more creative perspective.)

For me, being an "inside" musician quite a lot of the time, I tend to give a different reason why I don't like to attempt ensemble improvisations of songforms, vamps, or functional harmonies, which is that it more or less requires everyone in the group to be a mind reader.

Well, I would define those as more ad lib than improvising situations. And, I don't know that one would have to be a mind reader. Remember that a good amount, if not a lot of early free jazz attempted by boppers inevitably ended up as a blues.

When I hear bebop, I want to hear harmonic agreement; when I hear Beethoven, I want to hear right notes; and when I hear Improvised Music, I want to hear something akin to the approach you've carved out. But I suppose that brings us back to compartmentalization…

Yes, but from there, and with your restless, fertile mind, can come a (natural) synthesis; a conjoining not rooted in marketable eclecticism.

To go along with all of that, your response to the tradition question makes me realize that there is a parallel question, perhaps more to the point, about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics. For me, aestheticism is a first principle of sorts; I tend to feel that intentionally working against it is like cutting off your whole leg because of a blister on your foot. In any case, it seems to me that the notion of undermining the status quo becomes quite a bit muddier here, i.e. in light of the difference between striving to make "beautiful" work out of novel sounds/methods and making intentionally "ugly" work for whatever reason.

Ah, but there you're getting into our wiring; our cultural values based on conditioning. Ultimately, aestheticism and anti-aestheticism are the same thing, though aspects of each come to the fore based on what one is feeling at any given moment; thus impacting both musical decision-making and perception. This attempt to accept, embrace and utilize every/anything on some level forms a (not *the*) basis for free improvisation; at least for me.