Ericsson and Pool—Peak

Ericsson and Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(2016)

---

[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...

[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-

[13]

ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.

All Ages

Another point brought home by regular attendance at The Blue Whale: young people are capable of making great music, prodigies can sometimes live up to their hype, but it takes some old motherfuckers to make really timeless shit.

I myself was always an outlier without ever threatening to rise quite to the level of prodigy. I was also, if I don't say so myself, unusually level-headed about those kinds of things, and I generally got good advice and generally took it appropriately to heart. Where I and those I was immediately surrounded by failed, however, was in neglecting to accept college as a mere drop in the proverbial bucket of lifelong learning and evolution. Perhaps part of that was not knowing enough to see that four years was an inconceivably small amount of time in which to implement my conceptions, to say nothing of those I might have later. Being unusually facile at jumping through all the right hoops certainly hurt my chances of realizing this sooner. And yet the world, both within and without academia, seemed to no less than expect this from me and everyone else in the pipeline.

It took a healthy distance in both time and space from my college years for me to fully appreciate what a knot I had tied myself into during that time. It was a difficult, sometimes painful process to untie that knot. Once I decided that I could not possibly practice four hours a day without making unacceptable compromises in all the other musical areas that interested me, the physical dimension of brass playing became a major concern for me in a way it had never been previously, a double-whammy since I therefore had no experience dealing with it as such. Everything I knew about the tuba, myself, and the space where the two meet was based on a limber 20 year-old body and an even more voracious and self-motivated spirit. This has been its own adventure from which I am only now showing the smallest signs of emerging; even so, if it's possible to have been even slower to anticipate such changes in other areas, the conceptual area is just that place. It's hard to understand why I didn't stumble on certain ideas sooner...except that it's really not that hard at all. I didn't know enough, for one, but it's not just about knowing: doing matters too, and while it's possible to outpractice and outstudy your peers at an early age, I think it's much harder to accelerate the process of conceiving, realizing, curating, and reflecting, the process that drives artistic maturation not just internally but also in developing and understanding one's relationship to the world into which the work is to be released. And as any good constructivist would hasten to point out, even as I claim irreverence for such relationships to external forces, that in itself is a relationship I had better understand thoroughly before anything meaningful can come of it.

I have heard a number of young geniuses recently, players to whom I would be hanging on by a thread were I in their bands, and who are clearly much more than mere soulless technicians or stylists; and yet the old masters clearly have something more. They still have all the technique and vitality, but conceptually they are miles beyond musicians their children's age. And when you put it that way, who could really be surprised?

Backing Chinen

Nate Chinen has a humorous (at least to me) column on the "Jazzbro," defined as "a self-styled jazz aficionado, overwhelmingly male and usually a musician in training himself" who demonstrates

a compulsion to signal the awareness of any mildly startling musical detail, with muttered exclamations like the aforementioned "Woooo"; the emphatic adjectival use of the word "killing," as in "that solo was killing"; and the exploitation of jazz knowledge as a private commodity selectively put on public display.

That offense could possibly be taken to this only-half-humorous article merely confirms that the problem is real. Driven by just such a response from some corners, Chinen actually had to clarify that his beef is with "the performative exclamation, the posturing, self-congratulatory yawp," not with genuine expressions of audience enthusiasm. I couldn't agree more.

This kind of writing, in which hyperbole and sarcasm serve an earnest message, is deceptively difficult to pull off gracefully. I sometimes try it here and usually fail. Seriously, though, if you didn't LOL even a little bit upon learning that Jazzbros "ritually converge anytime Chris Potter is in town with his Underground band," I have some pretty serious reservations about you. And if Chinen's emphasis on age and gender understandably gives this piece an edge to those of us who find ourselves doubly implicated, this is in another sense actually an error of understatement: it has seemed to me for several years now that Jazzbroism is slowly spreading beyond its core demographic group of young males to define a broader swath of jazzland, one that, IMHO, is better defined stylistically. The website Nextbop, for example, though I value and commend them for the service they provide, operates squarely within this space in both style and substance.

In high school, when I first got serious about jazz and started going to more jazz camps, I was alternately enthralled with and taken aback by the top hats, banana ties and unruly comportment so self-consciously flaunted by "the jazz kids." My surly temperament, inexperience playing jazz, and background in classical music kept me from ever truly assimilating to this environment, and it was not much later that in pondering the prospects of becoming a teacher myself all of this began to trouble me in earnest. Though much of my own recent jazz work is concert-oriented, there is a time and place for vocal expressions of approval (perhaps even disapproval) even there, and I would agree with the most butthurt in the Jazzbro caucus that we could probably use more of it, not less. The point of Chinen's piece, which I think is equally important, is that disembodied affect is profoundly destructive, equally so to the experience of the music itself and to the social relationships immediately surrounding it.

Second Loves (i)

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.

Prodigy

There's nothing remarkable about prodigal talent. What's remarkable is when someone manages to recognize its existence.

Just Call Us "Other"

You can't make this stuff up...

From the Department of Poorly Written Program Notes, co-presented with the Department of Inadvertently Displayed Ignorance, and with promotional consideration provided by the Department of Midwestern Artsy-Fartsy Cuteness, I give you the blurb on George Benjamin's At First Light from the SPCO's "Program at a Glance," the condensed program notes that accompany the regular length program notes so that people who kind of care but kind of don't can learn something about the noise that is about to be foisted on them without taking too much time away from coughing and whispering to each other about how much they hate new music:


GEORGE BENJAMIN
At First Light

This piece, written when Benjamin was 22, was inspired by Turner's painting Norham Castle, Sunrise, an early precursor to impressionism. The music is itself a pastiche of gestures and abstractions. Fourteen musicians play more than 30 colorful instruments, including a bass trombone, whip, and a large newspaper.


Where to start? The appeal to age-based novelty is hardly uncommon, nor is the use of the term "gesture" as a backhanded compliment to a piece of new music, nor is the gratuitous use of an adjective such as "colorful" to distract listeners from the dissonance they're about to encounter. The crown jewel of this blurb, however, is the implication that the bass trombone is on par for novelty with a whip. A whip?!

It's true, I'm a low brass player myself, and hence a but biased, maybe even more than a bit insecure about our always tenuous status as "standard" members of the orchestra. That point aside, to categorize the bass trombone as novel is one thing, but to lump it in with whips and newspapers is completely absurd and ignorant. Not that I have anything against whips and newspapers (or rocks or sirens or bowed crotales...actually, I do have something against bowed crotales, but that story will have to wait for another time) being used as musical instruments, but I don't think its a stretch to say that the bass trombone has historically played a more significant role in the orchestra than they have.

In larger orchestras, the instrument is quite standardly used as the 3rd trombone, even if "bass" trombone was not specified by the composer. In case those of you who write program notes haven't ever actually been down to a concert since people got audacious enough to start sticking valves on trombones some several decades ago, this is because it sounds pretty damn close to a tenor trombone most of the time, and sounds even better in the lower registers by virtue of its larger bore, this despite being pitched in the same key as the tenor.

When one refers to a bass tuba, people are often curious as to how and why anyone would make a tuba that was even lower than normal, not realizing, of course, that the tubas they've seen and heard were, in most cases, contrabass tubas, and that bass tubas are actually smaller, not larger, than the instruments they're most familiar with. I suspect that, although the bass trombone is, in fact, larger than the the more commonly encountered tenor, the same dynamic is on display here, namely that the modifier is what catches people's attention first, along with the expectation that a bass version of an already low-pitched and heavily caricatured instrument must be something to behold. When this comes up in conversation with an avowed novice, I'm always happy to offer clarification, along with a good-natured, self-depricating low brass joke to help the medicine go down. When I read something like this in program notes supplied by a first-rate professional orchestra, the good-naturedness takes a hike. Writing program notes ought to consist of more than merely scanning the instrumentation for novelties, but when it must, a good handle on what exactly constitutes novelty in the first place is a must.

The poetic justice here? The trombonist played the entire part on his tenor (or, strictly speaking, "tenor-bass" trombone, a tenor trombone with one valve which lowers the pitch a perfect fourth, or less if the slide is out further at the time). Sorry, folks, you didn't get to hear bass trombone after all. If it's any consolation, at least you got to hear a nearly identical sound coming out of a nearly identical instrument, and at least the piece was actually written by a 22 year-old, albeit a 22 year-old who is now nearly 50. As for my consolation, I, probably alone, got to have a good chuckle at the status (or lack thereof) enjoyed by those of us who blow into big metal things that no one can name. It's not the first time, and I suspect it won't be the last.

Creative Aging

With today being my 26th birthday, this seems as good a time as ever to give some thought to the effects of age, experience, maturity etc. on musical creativity.

Do composers tend to get better with age? Is the opposite true to some extent of performers due to the physical nature of performing? A good many eminent jazz musicians died too young for us to study their examples in these respects, but what about the Dizzy Gillespies, Sonny Rollins, and Herbie Hancocks of the world, who did their best work as relatively young men? What about Joe Henderson and Stan Getz, who sustained an exceptionally high level of performance for decades even as their health declined? John Coltrane's career arc invites comparison with Beethoven's (early, middle and late periods), but how about Charlie Parker's with Schubert's (prolific output before an early death), Duke Ellington's with J.S. Bach's (longevity), or Albert Ayler's with Anton Webern's (small output, enormous influence, premature death)? The musician who makes a single landmark contribution tends to be remembered before the one who sustained a less exalted but perfectly respectable level consistently throughout their career. Still, the legacy of the former can be tainted by the appearance of having peaked too soon, and even more so by the appearance of having "sold out." A few musicians have abandoned creative activities altogether as they grew older, and very few take them up successfully for the first time late in life. Meanwhile, if a prodigy fizzles, is it because their fast progress burned them out faster, or because they were never that great in the first place? People my age will be watching the Eldars and Jay Greenbergs of the world with great curiosity over the coming decades for answers from our own time.

We can learn a little bit from studying past examples, but ultimately, we are all different and probably cannot predict our own trajectories. I often feel as if I would love to regain a certain amount of the naivite of my early creative efforts, if for no other reason than to reintroduce a certain kind of excitement that existed then but often seems to be gone forever now, even when I'm successful. The further one gets from this naivite, the more difficult the task of sustaining and improving one's work becomes; the minefield of both financial and social pressures is not for the faint of heart, and so the music must continue to be its own reward. My suspicion is not that I am becoming more or less creative with age, but that I am learning more as time goes on, which while useful and necessary, always mutes one's initial fascination with the subject matter at hand.

There's Still Time

In researching the Minnesota Orchestra's website for the previous missive, I stumbled upon this promo for an upcoming concert, excerpted below:

He wowed the audience in January when he performed here with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. In this concert, the 28-year-old Sean Jones joins with other rising stars to bring you fresh arrangements of jazz standards.

I know nothing about Mr. Jones and by no means wish to drag his name through the mud by saying this, but I'm suddenly comforted by the fact that whoever wrote this blurb seems to believe that the potential for age-based novelty still exists in a musician who is nearly 30 years old. That I have at least 3 more years to do something spectacular relative to my age is an entirely unexpected yet altogether pleasant surprise, even if it means temporarily forfeiting the right to be jealous of Eldar (disclaimer: shall I to fail to accomplish anything whatsoever these next 3 years, I reserve the right to reclaim this jealousy with all its privileges and obligations).

Of course, the 3-year window applies only to my tuba playing, since we all know that 50 is still young in composer-years. It's good to know that a press release fawning over "47-year old composer Stefan Kac" is not entirely out of the question. I might just write it now while the ideas are still fresh in my head and there are still 22 years left to double check spelling and grammar. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to Orchestra Hall on June 26 to see what all the fuss is about. You see, I'll be out of town that week playing at the International Tuba Euphonium Conference...even though I'm only 25.