Heigh Ho, Pomo

Gerald Graff
"The Myth of Postmodern Breakthrough" (orig. 1979)
in Critical Essays on American Postmodernism (1994)
ed. Stanley Trachtenberg
pp. 69-80

In an essay that asks the question, "What Was Modernism?" Harry Levin identifies the "ultimate quality" pervading the work of the moderns as "its uncompromising intellectuality." The conventions of postmodern art systematically invert this modernist intellectuality by parodying its respect for truth and significance. ... It appears that the term "meaning" itself, as applied not only to art but to more general experience, has joined "truth" and "reality" in the class of words which can no longer be written unless apologized for by inverted commas.

Thus it is tempting to agree with Leslie Fiedler's conclusion that "the Culture Religion of Modernism" is now dead. The most advanced art and criticism of the last twenty years seem to have abandoned the modernist respect for artistic meaning. The religion of art has been "demythologized." A number of considerations, however, render this statement of the case misleading. Examined more closely, both the modernist faith in literary meanings and the postmodern repudiation of these meanings prove to be highly ambivalent attitudes, much closer to one another than may at first appear. The equation of modernism with "uncompromising intellectuality" overlooks how much of this intellectuality devoted itself to calling its own authority into question. . . .

(pp. 70-71)

With no scruples whatseover about repeating myself, I must say that following my trip to art school the ultimate archetype of these "highly ambivalent attitudes" and of the "deliberate avoidance of interpretability ha[ving] moved from the arts into styles of personal behavior" (71) will always be, for me, the radical conceptual art grad student who drives a gas-guzzling motor vehicle and listens exclusively to top-40 radio.

My unconsidered gut reaction to Graff's final sentence above is that "modernist" musicians tended more towards reasserting/recovering/recreating some lost "authority" and were usually not too interested in questioning themselves. Also that the principals of the eventual postmodern backlash are quite comfortable slipping into the tattered robes of "authority" whenever they think they can get away with it. Hence this whole question of exposing shams of undue authority is what inclines me toward a positive self-identification as a "postmodernist." I can't really say so in casual conversation, however, because there are too many other associations with the term which don't fit me at all.

Conspicuous among them: I do believe that rational, just authority exists. It's just that, in music, I am typically most skeptical about its possibility on the level of "meaning;" and yes, those scare-quotes are so totally necessary anytime that warhorse word is trotted out of the stable.

Fromm and Maccoby on the Total Character Structure

The nonproductive forms of social relatedness in a predominantly productive person—loyalty, authority, fairness, assertiveness—turn into submission, domination, withdrawal, destructiveness in a predominantly nonproductive person. Any of the nonproductive orientations has, therefore, a positive and a negative aspect, according to the degree of productiveness in the total character structure. (78)

Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby
Social Character
in a Mexican Village (1970)

p. 79 has a long list of "positive aspects" along with their "negative aspects," the idea being as above that the productive/nonproductive binary is the linchpin distinction which colors most other secondary traits.

These sorts of theoretical edifices are always a bit unsightly, but the general insight that the beneficence or malevolence of a given trait is actually a function of many or all of the accompanying traits is a brilliant one. In Minneapolis of course, the nonproductive version of openness is apathy. (CalArts too.)

[from a notebook, 2016 or 2017]

The First of the Rest

I
Early last spring, spurred on by a band director's curious statement as reported to me by a mutual student, I sat down to write my next pointed tract on the relationship between technical and creative musical development. My greatest initial trepidation therein stemmed from the danger of slipping into needless reprises of arguments which I had already presented here and elsewhere several times over. Yet even as such fears melted away in the face of fresh insights, a new problem presented itself: while the line of development was clear in my head from the outset, the task of fleshing out each small detail of the argument suddenly seemed inexhaustible; the simplest statements of position on a particular matter led to multiple pages of excursus on all manner of peripheral details, musical and otherwise, details which I had never intended to dredge up but which the offending statement itself had shown could not be taken for granted. Indeed, the realization that nothing could be taken for granted quickly displaced the particulars of the incident as the impetus behind the essay, and at this point the task seemed too broad.

The paper I had envisioned writing was hence threatening to take on dimensions all out of proportion with the real salience of the theme. In short, I found that I was no longer capable of addressing the obstacles faced in refining and enriching our pedagogy without being burdened by their rootedness in so many intractable real-world questions which otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with music. This came as a particular shock to someone who for the bulk of his formal education would simply stop writing when he felt intuitively that he was finished, who consistently turned in papers that were a half-page short of the prescribed minimum length, who repeatedly dared his instructors to blink, and, if I may brag a bit, succeeding without exception in doing so. Then one day, all grown up and having become thoroughly burdened and preoccupied with "adult" concerns such as feminist separatism in the arts, cultural co-optation, the ethical dimensions of aesthetics, and so on, this student opened up an already sprawling text file on his laptop and was overtaken seemingly in an instant by a classic case of paralysis-by-analysis. There was at that point no possible way for me to continue with the arduous project I had begun, not even if it has yet to entirely cease appearing as the logical and necessary next step in the portion of my life's work concerned with education.

This only feels like a setback. It certainly looks like a setback as far as the right sidebar of this blog is concerned. In reality, it is a realization that had to be made in order for me to move ahead, final confirmation of something I've known for a long time but haven't been willing to fully accept: that everything I've written prior is fundamentally naive, no matter its learnedness on particular subjects here and there; that I've learned just enough to emerge from naivete but not nearly enough to be considered wise; and that until I obtain the requisite book smarts, everything I write subsequently will issue from the middle ground between these two poles, which is the absolute worst place to be in every way both as a thinker and as an artist. And so as most anyone else would, I did initially absorb all of this as a setback, emotionally at least. This is the primary reason for the long silence here. The other reason is the immense amount of time I have been investing in offline reading projects with an eye towards pushing through this impasse. (Against my better judgment, I am now tracking all of this through a Goodreads account if anyone wants to make contact there.) There is not much for me to write passionately about right now other than to post book reports on esoteric authors as a way of laying my proverbial nuts on the floor. Having read plenty of these book reports in the course of my first decade of blogging, I've chosen to forgo this thirtysomething rite of passage until I've had time to digest the material and conceive some more original insight.

Such it is that the final nail has belatedly but inevitably been hammered into the coffin of my intellectual adolescence, of which there can be no doubt this blog has served as the focal point since its inception. I do not intend to give up blogging, nor to cease raising the occasional ruckus over mainstream music education's myriad vicissitudes of expedience, but it is high time to admit to myself and to anyone who cares about me and/or my work that things simply cannot remain as they have been, and that the necessary changes are not all comfortable ones to make.


II
I remain most interested in and committed to what for lack of another term with greater contemporary currency I must anachronistically continue to call "absolute music," or at least to the ideal of it if that is as far as the skeptic and the populist are jointly willing to indulge me on the matter. Nothing has yet convinced me that the abstract musical experience is somehow pathological or degenerate in any of the many ways it has frequently been made out to be, and I hasten to single out the accusation of escapism for an especially pointed disavowal. Rather, it is precisely because I have always been quite preoccupied with the bigger picture that music has always seemed both overwhelmingly ineffectual as activism and itself vilely disfigured by the weight of being asked to do so much more than it is capable of. Ignorance and/or apathy vis-a-vis the copious observable evidence in favor of this position has always stuck me first and foremost as a profound insensitivity on the part of those who would otherwise like to position themselves as the feeling, humane party to this debate, in contradistinction to the emotionless, tone-deaf formalists¹. Whatever the shortcomings of formalism, a blind faith that "music can change the world" in no way follows directly from them. Such blind faiths betray not sensitivity but numbness, not altruism but self-absorption; in other words, they betray precisely the condition which they themselves most customarily ascribe to formalism itself. Perhaps it takes one to know one?

I am, I will confess as if it were not so obvious from virtually everything I've written here, quite sensitive in this way and in other ways too. As a result, it is true that constitutional factors are at the root of my inability to abide the more-is-more aesthetics of so much contemporary art regardless of any of its alleged epistemological (un)moorings that may also contribute. At a certain point it makes no difference to me whether the artist's intentions are manifested as overbearing political content, multidisciplinarity, abuse of dynamic extremes, conceptual provocation, or, as befits the trope, all of these at once and more; eventually my fragile viscera simply reaches overload and I have to sign off.

I see a Hollywood movie in the theaters only every couple of years, and I feel downright autistic from the moment I enter the lobby to the moment I depart it. Contrary to the formalist stereotype, I am hardly oblivious to the calculated emotional roller coaster; rather, I am usually on the verge of tears and simply have to go home and sleep it off in order to come to my senses. The fact that such an overwhelming majority of my cultural compatriots not only willingly endure this but in fact actively seek it out and repeat it compulsively merely confirms that they must be wired differently than I am². At that point I am tempted to throw up my arms in a conniption fit of relativism and say, "Live and let live! We agree to disagree! It's all so byooo-tiful! " I have certainly flirted with this mindset during the recent dormancy period here, for reasons outlined above. But of course it is difficult (impossible?) to fully live up to this intention, it is an intention which is unlikely to be reciprocated by much of anybody else, and besides all of that, I would say that any time we neglect to unpack what is going behind the scenes of such a contentious issue, we evince a certain apathy that is unbecoming of a socially engaged artist. So let's continue to hash it out, no? I promise that dormancy periods here are only ever temporary, no matter how long they might seem to go on.

The oversensitivity defense certainly is a useful deflection for me to invoke here provided that the prosecution is capable of understanding this term matter-of-factly rather than in the pathologized sense so often invoked by faux-liberals eager to defend their habitual microaggressions. Even if I were a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, though, I think that after several years of concert-going in Los Angeles I would still greet the exceedingly rare opportunity to experience live music without the ubiquitous multi-media projections exactly as I do now; that is, with no small amount of relief. As it is, notwithstanding the inevitability of the (very) occasional masterpiece in virtually any idiom, it only seems clearer that the present inescapability of mixed media is a textbook case of turning up the volume of the conversation simply in an attempt to be heard over the chatter of cultural overproduction and oversaturation. If formalists are to be aggressively held to account for their alleged self-referentialism and sophistry, then conceptualists should be at least equally compelled to answer for their various excesses. I would say that they actually should be held to firmer account because the culture within which they operate incentivizes such excesses in wild disproportion to most every other modus operandi. What perplexes non-believers most about formalism is the difficulty of establishing motive; what perplexes about conceptualists is that there are so many motives to choose from that you can never know for sure which ones are real, intentional, or sincere, or in fact if any of these descriptors apply at all³. I think that what I just wrote is absolutely an instance of hating the game and not the player. Hence, as the Theorists would have it regarding more pressing social identity issues, we really do need to see difference here rather than simply reenacting the familiar relativist abdication of judgment, because difference is in fact political in this instance as in so many others. Aesthetic relativism is, as I have written before, both a social grace and a social ill, so let's indeed answer for ourselves even if no one asked and see what insights this exercise generates. Triangulation is most detectable where cheap thrills are appealed to the most shamelessly, but it would be a mistake to pretend that it was not at play elsewhere, including in absolute music itself. To be clear, I am all for cheap thrills; even so, we know what eventually happens to people who eat only junk food.

See how you can be a socially conscious musician without burning effigies of politicians during your concerts? It's not impossible, people. Get over yourselves.


III
Of course, my frozen essay was not to be about absolute music, activist art, or multidisciplinarity, but rather about particular technical aspects of music pedagogy in young brass players. I'm taking this diversion only to head off the accusation of hypocrisy, that is, the notion that my awakening to the inadequacy of my extramusical learning is an indictment of my previous insistence on absolute music-making. To the contrary, this awakening has only confirmed more strongly for me that musicianship and citizenship are overwhelmingly separate spheres. I've never advocated for ignorance or escapism, just for a necessary degree of compartmentalization as dictated by the facts on the ground. It is a compartmentalization which, in my humble opinion, any human being capable of wiping their own behind ought also be capable of maintaining without spiraling uncontrollably into the nihilism and narcissism of the archetypal Formalist strawman. I certainly consider myself amply capable of this maintenance (I've had some practice), and if lengthy reflections such as this one aren't enough to earn at least a modicum of credibility on this front, then I should probably just give up trying.

I will at least concede that the narcissism is kept at bay far more easily than the nihilism which seems to lurk around every ontological corner⁴. I suppose it was only a matter of time before nihilism started to penetrate the part of my self-constructed intellectual inner sanctum most explicitly concerned with people; that is, with pedagogy and "The Theory-Technique-Creativity Nexus," which was to be the title of my paper. Disembodied works of art are easier to get along with on a daily basis than people are, even if there's no such thing as perfection in either case. Such it is that I find it (perhaps temporarily, but in any case quite thoroughly) impossible to spill another ounce of effort inveighing against scale nazis, pattern pushers, or passive recreators, each of whose conditions I am now compelled to see as ineluctably contingent upon their wider cultural worlds, and which I hence have no hope of meaningfully reforming, no matter how well-conceived or well-executed my writing on the topic might be. Members of these groups, some of whom I count as valued colleagues and collaborators in other ways, will just have to lie in the beds that they have made for themselves, and I in mine. These people will continue to dominate the pedagogical scene as long as the culture at large continues to produce them in such numbers and favors their paint-by-number expediency over the long road of pan-stylistic internalization. Having reached that conclusion, belatedly it would be fair to say, it is no longer worth my time to agonize over how to best communicate ideas that will not be received with action, even if they are received with a variety of more superficial, ultimately meaningless praises, as some of my earlier pedagogical writings have been. To be sure, I have no illusions of being able to change the larger culture all by myself either. That is a larger task, not a smaller one. But at least an ill-fated joyride in that direction sounds interesting to me; at least I can be stimulated by it; at least I can sound smarter, if not actually be smarter, by investing earnestly and intensely in extramusical learning for the first time since my mid-teens. As friend and bandmate Max Kutner aptly put it in a recent conversation, reading French Theory is great as long as you don't start writing tunes about it. I really couldn't have said it better. I have a different relationship to "tunes" than I do to people, and I think that makes me a scholar, not a hypocrite.

Responding to incredulous, disbelieving rejoinders when I reveal that I have not earnestly practiced scales since 10th grade, that I credit this very intentional decision with helping me get to where I am today creatively on the horn, and that I later discovered a modicum of laboratory support for my youthful conjecture in the form of the "exposure effect" is something which no longer interests me as it once did. I would like to think that thoughtful contributions to this effect could be considered part of good citizenship broadly construed, but at this point it feels more like an entropic blowing of smoke in the direction of old dogs of all ages who are incapable of learning new tricks. Therefore, unless you are my student or otherwise make a conscientious inquiry on such matters, I am done with them for the time being. Let's talk about culture, and then let's "escape" into music-making as whole people and conscious citizens without either forgetting or being limited by what we've learned.


notes
1. By the same token, the next time you see a musician or their work described as "introspective," ask yourself, "Can one become an artist of any caliber, by virtually any value system, without a fair quantity self-reflection?!" I think not, which seals the fact of the co-optation of the term. It also seals the diagnosis of (b)latent sexism when this term is indiscriminately applied to the work of women musicians.

2. On the other hand, Jon Wagner's Contemporary Film Theory class at CalArts not only served as an ideal survey of Critical Theory but also made me realize how easily I could get sucked into Second Cinema. I had to bald-face lie my way into this class, for which the prerequisite is "an abiding interest in film." By the end of it this was only a little white lie. Only Mrs. Stammers' IB Theory of Knowledge has had the impact on my intellectual life that this class has, and it meant a tremendous amount to me to receive a totally unexpected email from Mr. Wagner at the end of the term thanking me for my papers.

3. If no one else who went to CalArts is willing to speak what we all saw, then I will: multidisciplinarity at CalArts is first and foremost a way for third year BFAs to keep in touch with friends from other programs after they all move out of the school-mandated dorm stay and into their own far-flung apartments spanning the seven boroughs of Santa Clarita. Operating in parallel to this surfeit of juvenilia are a handful of graduate students, many of them working professionals and fantastically talented, who seek out the school specifically for its emphasis on collaboration across disciplines. I lost track of all the bitter stories I heard from this latter contingent about how departmental turf wars undermined access to resources they needed to do this work. You may socialize free of charge, but equipment and space cost money.

Contrary to my stated anti-relativism, those who know me offline know that I'm a very good sport about being involved in projects which don't necessarily align with the "absolute music" orientation I outline in this post. At school I almost always had fun performing in multi-disciplinary projects (as I say, I think that was the point of most of them), and occasionally I learned something of enduring value too. Overwhelmingly, though, what struck me most immediately and intensely about the bulk of the multidisciplinary work made at CalArts was its sheer callowness. The work I've seen out here in the postgraduate Real World is only slightly more encouraging, and really, how could its evolution be any more than slight having incubated in such an environment?

While on the whole I wouldn't trade my time at CalArts for anything, this was and is all very dispiriting. How could the social and turf war issues possibly be unrelated to it?

4. Early returns indicate that reading more books is making me less certain about important issues, not more, and hence more readily threatening to toss me to the dogs of nihilism rather than snatching me from their jaws. But at least I've found the ability in early middle age to have fun doing something other than music and sports.

At Long Last, A YouTube Presence

Large Whole-Number Ratios

I was reminded recently of a certain inconvenient fact about my master's degree:

As the graduation ceremony program shows, the CalArts School of Music granted nearly identical numbers of BFA and MFA degrees last spring. Occasionally people from outside the music profession will poo-poo a sarcastic remark about music degrees. Certainly my CalArts experience was worth quite a bit more than the degree ever could be. Yet isn't there something mildly unsettling about the notion of handing out graduate degrees in any of the arts or humanities nearly forty at a time? And even if the sheer number doesn't impress you, wouldn't you also say that the ratio between undergraduate and graduate degrees is much more flagrantly in violation of what once would have been called responsible academic behavior in fields where jobs don't exactly grow on trees? And if not for finding teaching work, what, exactly, is the degree for in the first place?

(For the record, both the raw numbers and the grad/undergrad ratios were similar in the schools of Art, Theater, and Film and Video. In Dance, where practice disproportionately trumps scholarship, and Critical Studies, where the opposite is true, many fewer MFAs were granted compared to BFAs.)

I'm not exactly blazing a trail here noting that the number of graduate music degrees granted and the number of real jobs for those graduates are out of whack with each other, nor am I the first to notice the Ponzi-like aspects of the academic food chain, nor does it take me and my blog to establish that the revenue feeding the scheme overwhelmingly represents debt of one kind or another incurred by students. The trite "real-world" stuff is no less troubling for having been recounted a million times, but as someone who may still yet be both a student and a teacher for the ump-teenth time each, I want to make sure we don't lose sight of the more abstract, less quantifiable aspects of all of this. To wit: is there anything left the truly gifted student might be able to do to distinguish him- or herself from the merely good? At what point does the propagation of opportunities for "encouraging" young artists swallow the entire endeavor whole? At what point have we encouraged enough of them to have discouraged all of them? Or, on the other hand, has the playing field actually been leveled in a constructive way, the profligacy of degree-granting institutions ensuring that bookish academic politicians with trust funds have a harder time swindling their way into real-world success that outpaces their talent now that everyone else has, on paper at least, much the same academic pedigree as they do?

It may be a stretch, even now, to say that a college degree is the new high school diploma, but perhaps the MFA, on the other hand, really is the new BFA. Seems to me that any serious disagreement with that statement has first and foremost to confront the numbers.

Exit Strategies IV: Equal Time

Regular readers, if I have any, are no doubt accustomed to a steady diet of negativity and skepticism regarding just about every topic I choose to address. CalArts issues certainly have not been excepted. In my defense, I can only insist that a pure nihilist and absolute skeptic would not see the need to pour so much time and effort into polishing his purely nihilistic, absolutely skeptical evaluations of the world into moderately presentable prose missives and uploading them into an already-bizarre web-based interface which, to boot, is rendered only semi-functional by the age of his decaying computer. The worldview of this hypothetical person is one whereby the tasks to which I typically set myself here are superfluous. I see fit to mention that every so often just in case it's not otherwise obvious.

Quite to the contrary, I happen to cling to a garden-variety blogospheric aspiration that I think unites many writers of seemingly disparate orientations and styles, namely the faith that spewing our vitriol all over the internet might eventually have some small impact on someone else's thinking on a subject of particular importance to us both, even if that impact is merely to sharpen and clarify a dissenting view, and further, that the act of engaging in this dialogue is of limited but nonetheless vital importance to building and sustaining a functional, living and conscientious musical culture, such a culture being one small but necessary facet of a similarly functional and conscientious larger society.

Such it is that lurking beneath my outer cynic is an inner utopian, and I don't just mean in having the audacity to think people might actually read, but rather to imagine that by doing so they might come to understand the world a little bit better for the purpose of improving it. That is why I have invested a bit more than people of my parents' generation might recommend in following a variety of other music-oriented blogs, and it is ultimately just what I aspire to offer here for whoever might be up for it, even if it seems on the surface that I'm just a chronic bellyacher. Having said all of that, I do occasionally give thought to the overwhelmingly negative character of this blog and what that means for me, for the reader, and yes, for the world. To wit, as I've now more or less exorcised my grad school grievances, it occurs to me that some "equal time" is indeed in order, be as it may destined to fall well short of truly balancing the amount of criticism I've already leveled.

So...[clears throat]...My time at CalArts was a transformative experience in the fullest and most positive sense of that term. Two years is not nearly long enough to fully avail oneself of the human, curricular and physical resources of this school, and yet I doubt that I have ever been more productive during any other period of my life, at least not across all of my concurrent musical interests at once, a direct credit to an institution that is uniquely conducive to and encouraging of the kind of informed eclecticism that has marked my musical maturity. Similarly, what I have seen and heard so far from the network of recent and not-so-recent CalArtian musicians living and working in the greater Los Angeles area is staggering in both technical polish and creative potency. The end-times-like vibe of so many current extramusical events notwithstanding, there is greater potential here for me than I yet know quite what to do with, and I quite look forward to figuring it out.

There. Is that better?

[sc]airquotes (v)

Instead of repeating such Western myths of the noncontingency of artworks, why not search for jazz meanings behind the music, in the life-shapes that gave rise to it and that continue to sustain it? Why not, in other words, scrutinize the interactions between our own rules of formation and those we impute to the makers of jazz as the source of our evaluations of it? Why not create a jazz pedagogy in which our construction of the varieties of black life experience takes priority, saving the music–intricately bound up with those experiences, after all–for last, construing it in light of them and resisting the aestheticizing tendency to exaggerate its differences from other manifestations of expressive culture?

...Placing the music first will always distance it from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that made it and that sustain it. It will always privilege the European bourgeois myths of aesthetic transcendency, artistic purity untouched by function and context, and the elite status of artistic expression. (Such myths concerning the composers of the European canon badly need to be exploded, so it is all the more troubling to see them neatly transferred to African-American composers and performers.) Emphasizing the musical appreciation of jazz only transfers to the study of African-American music the formalist view that remains debilitatingly dominant in Eurocentric musicology, with its continuing emphasis on internalist music analysis." (89)

Gary Tomlinson. Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies. Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 71-105.

Exit Strategies III: Documentation

Given all the blather about the before, during and after of my CalArts sojourn, you're probably wondering what, if anything, I actually did while I was there. To that end, I've added the choicest nuggets of 2012-13 to the Materials page at stefankac.com and to the corresponding sidebar here at Fickle Ears. Below, I've assembled an annotated guide, plus a couple of blog-only extras for the stalwarts among you. Enjoy.

•••••
from The "H" Series :

H-8
listen (MP3)
view score (PDF)

H-9
listen (MP3)
view score (PDF)

Stefan Kac Quintet
Elysia Strauss, soprano saxophone
Andrew Rowan, trumpet/flugelhorn
Will Wulfeck, trombone
Stefan Kac, tuba
Amir Oosman, drums

from Five Movements for Clarinet, Viola and Piano

Second Movement
listen (MP3)

Third Movement
listen (MP3)

view full score
(PDF)

CalArts New Century Players
Julia Heinen, clarinet
Morgan Gerstmar, viola
Vicky Ray, piano

•••••
I appear on two selections from the 2013 CalArts Jazz CD: Whack Stack of Mister's Sly, by Will Wulfeck, and an abridged version of The "H" Series: H-9 :

Whack Stack of Mister's Sly

Will Wulfeck Quintet
Will Wulfeck, trombone
Elysia Strauss, saxophones
Greg Uhlmann, guitar
Stefan Kac, tuba
Sean Fitzpatrick, drums



The "H" Series: H-9

Stefan Kac Quintet
(personnel as above)

•••••
For my graduation recital, I gave an unaccompanied solo tuba recital. Here is the closing "Postlude," an improvisation:

Postlude

On this recital, I also presented my first fixed-media electro-acoustic composition. Let's call it Series 0: 0-1. I have been using the free program Audacity out of a combination of choice and necessity. I'm sure there are many good reasons to aim higher in the software department, but frankly, I don't yet know what I would do with a more capable program seeing that I can't yet imagine exhausting the possibilities presented by this one. I intend to write more about this sometime in the near future. For now, enjoy this first attempt. It doesn't quite do justice to everything I'm envisioning, but the journey has been rewarding and stimulating nonetheless.

from Series 0:

0-1

Though I wrote this specifically for the recital, I was nervous about playing it back in such a live room. In the end, the room actually warmed the sound nicely and covered some of the technical deficiencies, kind of like it does with live tuba playing. Go figure.

•••••
There is much more, of course, but discretion is the better part of valor in the content-rich life. These are the documents which I feel most do justice to the work, and for that I am eternally grateful to all collaborators, teachers and crew who were involved in bringing this music to fruition. So long to grad school and hello "real" world. That you might be more real than last time we met.

Exit Strategies I: Sobriety

Being a musician is not my "dream." My "dream" was to be a professional baseball player, something farfetched enough, in my case at least, to become an obsession, and gun-to-my-head, I'd still rather be chasing it if I could. My relationship to music is rather different, but not simply because I showed infinitely greater natural ability (whatever we're currently agreeing or not agreeing that means) from a much earlier stage. Music was a significant part of my early childhood, though I resisted active participation until adolescence; the majority of blood relatives I have known in the flesh were or are accomplished amateur musicians; there was a mystical sense of rightness in my earliest experiences with the euphonium which I remember vividly despite at that time not yet possessing a vocabulary flowery enough to fully describe it; I had been obsessed as a child with acquiring paper and notebooks, writing page-long stories about my cats whenever my elementary school teachers would accept them as substitutes for those miserable "reading book" assignments, and once I found music, it became an even more fluent outlet for these creative urges, leading to the composition of about 120 short pieces from 7th through 12th grade.

Much of this does not particularly distinguish me from many of my peers, though some of it does. What I feel more acutely than anything as I sit here today, however, having just made it out of CalArts at the age of 30 with most but not all of my dignity intact is the dissonance between the rhetoric of "chasing your dreams" or "doing what you love" with which young artists are so often bombarded and that of my actual personal history, worldview and posture. The musician in me has goals, not dreams, and at the risk of committing middle-aged revisionism against my younger days, I would say that this has largely always been the case. Ecstasy is the domain of the sudden, the unexpected, the farfetched; it's what I would have felt if I had ever been offered a college scholarship to play baseball, been drafted by a major league organization, signed a professional contract, and so on. My musical journey has not of course been entirely devoid of ecstatic moments, but I can count them on one hand. Conversely, the moments along the way where I figured out, in part, what I really should be doing with myself have been overwhelmingly matter-of-fact ones, marked by a distinctive calming sensation, and too numerous to recall in sum.

I am not a spiritual person and therefore am avoiding speaking here of what I or anyone else was "meant" to do by some omniscient deity or the alignment of the planets. I don't think it's a stretch, however, to posit that in a more pragmatic, rational, earthly sense, those factors which have shaped us from birth yet lie beyond our control taken together with the general condition of the world we find ourselves inheriting (once we become aware of it, and once we have taken control of ourselves) can certainly clarify the picture for us substantially when it comes to deciding how to pass the time. In a 100% fair and just world, I would not be a professional musician or athlete, but rather a scientist. Given my family background, academic predilections, innate abilities, and general social considerations of long-term stability and respectability, a 100% fair and just world would have nurtured my stated desire to do science rather than throwing it back in my face at every turn. Perhaps in that 100% fair and just world, I would be "meant" to do science. In the real world, however, despite the many frustrations of a career in music and the poor manner in which my experiences as an aspiring scientist reflect upon the institutions I attended, I have trouble convincing myself that I was actually "meant" to do science and not music.

It feels good to have found my lane, but not good enough to throw a party. Parties are reserved for the momentous and the unexpected; for reaching landmarks, not for just existing; for the fulfillment of dreams, not goals. We "dream" of building houses on hills, sailing around the world, winning the lottery, witnessing the turn of a millennium, meeting Kim Kardashian, and other asinine preoccupations that would (and do) destroy us if our obsession with them becomes normalized. Only in vocations widely thought to be privileges in comparison to the life of the average working stiff do we find such a high incidence of recreational self-celebration verging on narcissism: art, sports, politics, and so on. This tells us something about privilege, but it tells us even more clearly and importantly that the bulk of these individuals are living their dreams, not their goals; that talent and happenstance aside, they were not truly "meant" to be artists or athletes or politicians; that if they were, they would comport themselves with a far higher degree of modesty and class.

I did not attend my graduation from the University of Minnesota, and I hid, quite literally, in my room for nearly a whole day last year to avoid the CalArts graduation festivities as they unfolded not far from my door. I did attend this year, however, which brought all of this home to me in a big way. I have been struggling ever since to put into words everything that I sensed and felt throughout that evening. What you've just read is part of it, and there's still more, which is liable to take me several more paragraphs, perhaps posts, to exhaust. A relative said I looked embarrassed, which was precisely correct even though I hadn't initially thought to put it that way. People who know me are laughing as they read this, thinking it's just the standard-issue curmudgeonly diatribe from the guy who would rather hole up with the complete Lutoslawski and a bottle of wine than go have a beer with the guys. I do, admittedly, have a strong aversion to pisserfest clusterfucks involving any but my very most favorite people in the world, but that is beside the point here. The point, rather, is that as graduate after graduate traipsed across that stage in their Halloween costumes, accompanied by their favorite nine seconds of music, in many cases acting out rehearsed gestures and/or jumping on the mic for quasi-forbidden shoutouts, I simply could not convince myself that I was watching people who had found their lanes. This has nothing to do with the fact that I generally don't like parties and everything to do with a bunch of spoiled brats throwing a party for themselves without in many cases having yet entered the phases of their lives when "dreams" and "goals" as I have called them have become discernible from each other.

To be sure, not everyone at CalArts is a spoiled brat, some degrees granted there mean more than others in their respective fields, and there are lots of students there, undergrads as well as grads, who have indeed been out in the working world for some stretch of time or other. The rest of y'all might do well to take a cue from a professional athlete named David West and act like you've been there before. When I wrote in the previous post of "how destructive the ongoing excessive romanticization of the arts remains to the arts themselves," I was trying to point to an issue which is at its heart a decisively economic and political one and not merely a cultural or social one as it might appear on the surface. It is remarked upon often what a privilege it is to have a career in the arts when judged against the backdrop of the things that most other people do for a living simply because most other people are profoundly unhappy doing those things for the amount of time their jobs require it of them, or at least a lot less happy than the average professional artist or athlete or politician, or so the logic goes. At this point you will of course recognize this as the rhetoric of "dreams," of our culture's obsession with having it better than your neighbor, of winning the meritocracy, of defining art (socially!) by negation rather than by affirmation, which is not to say that I am oblivious to any sense of my own privilege in having had the opportunity to become an artist, just that there is an important difference between hope and fear to which artists (of all people) ought to be particularly finely attuned. And while I have known very few truly malcontent professional artists, I do sense fear at nearly every turn in the professional world: fear of poverty, of day jobs, of failure to keep up appearances and the ubiquitous threat of silent judgment by parents and peers, a brand of fear which, by my sensibilities at least, is rather inherently destructive to the artistic impulse even if it seems to live in the realm of "real life."

Superfluous, perhaps, to point out that Western musicians before Beethoven and Liszt were closer to working stiffs in both cultural and material terms, but it's interesting to consider. It seems counterintuitive but is in fact the case that romanticism was deeply concerned with what today we call "outreach" but not at all with "plurality:" high art was to be shared with all, but there was a way to listen, to play, to write; the people were not to beat the aristocracy but rather to join them. The final deconstruction of taste, valuation, essentialism, innateness, etc. only came much later, intended to make art, in the West the ultimate privilege for centuries, into a human right; and yet art has only became more of a privilege as this relativization of reception fragmented the market right along with culture itself. Ironically, one can scarcely imagine there's another place on Earth which has devoted so much real and imagined effort toward such deconstruction, relativization and utopian egalitarianism than CalArts, and yet the comportment of the students there (and this extends far beyond the graduation party) has all the rhetoric of the petit bourgeois masquerading as aristocrat, of new money on parade without knowing quite how to behave itself.

For the record, I am all for art as a right, at least in theory, but I recognize that this cannot happen until it ceases to be ecstatic and once again becomes workaday. What I mean of course is not that the experience of art must cease to be ecstatic, but rather that the posture of its creators within the context of their society must break with the rhetoric of privilege. The question of whether this is either possible or desirable is not one I feel up to tackling right this minute. What I am ready to do is to leave the pretension of "dreams" behind in the CalArts bubble.

When We Listen To How Much of What, and Why

"...but would you rather listen to Bach or Vivaldi after a long day at work?"

Um...is this a trick question?

My name is Stefan and I have a problem. I listen the most to the music that is most important to me. Parties are not welcome respites from talking about music, but in fact welcome opportunities to talk about the music I really want to talk about. I've been known to "chill" at the end of a long day with my friends Shostakovich and Lutoslawski. Like everyone else, when I have leisure time, I do what I want; unlike everyone else, what I want to do most of the time is hear/read/write/contemplate that which gives my life purpose.

I'm struck by some recent comments and events here at school implying that there's something wrong or unusual about this. It's not the first time, but it still gets under my skin. If you almost never listen to a style of music, it is not "important" to you, no matter what you say. If certain "heavy" composers are set aside only for special occasions and rare states of consciousness, those are not your favorite composers, no matter what you say. The music that is important to you is your daily nourishment, not a delicacy to be ascetically reserved for special occasions. The things in life that are important to you are the things you confide in your friends, not those which you hide from them for fear of coming off a square. (Or are they your friends after all?)

Everyone needs a break. Even I retreat to the basketball court or the Scrabble board from time to time. Maybe it'd be nice if the rest of y'all that I have to live and work with didn't look quite so eager to get away? Maybe just humor that guy at the party who won't leave music behind when he leaves campus? Be yourself, of course, but dare I say maybe don't be quite so openly proud for not being like that guy if you really think this is what you want to do with your life?

How peculiar this all looks to someone of my sensibilities, accustomed as I am to being bludgeoned over the head with the insistence that art and life must be joined at the hip; that Art without Culture is just gymnastics; that "making pretty things" for their own sake is merely an adolescent phase; that the most important thing about art is its social message; that beauty and craft are merely Trojan Horses, used by elitist ideologues to seduce, hypnotize and disenfranchise the common folk; that silly white musicians err in treating their sound as an external "artifact" where they might more properly seek a "voice"; that music "matters" because it makes kids smart; in other words, that autonomous art is degenerate art, specifically because "autonomy" means severing the work from all of the things which make it "relevant" (if not always "beautiful," which is of course is strictly optional).

Having thus shoehorned Art into Life, Life does the Dosey Do! What a drag! Of course you don't talk about anti-aesthetic art any more than you have to! Of course you need a break from it twice a day! Of course you put on something else when your friends are over! You made it to be life, but not your life! You made it to teach society a lesson you were born knowing! Let them sort out your dogpile while you enjoy your teeny-bop techno music and totally epic wall hangings! Real life is, like, totally important to who you are as an artist, but it's not like anyone is going to live it all the time!

One of my favorite ambiguous statements is one I first heard uttered earnestly: "The only reason to do music for a living is that you can't do anything else." I ask any musician reading this to stop for a moment and consider which, if either, sense of this statement applies to you.

More is more (and not just of what it is of)

Upon running into a non-musician CalArtian friend before a concert and learning that she is attending in order to hear the work of a musician she has agreed to collaborate with, the following exchange ensued:

SK: So it's an interdisciplinary thing?

FRIEND: No, I'm not asking for funding.

Thirsty Thursday

Thursdays are a night of ritual partying at CalArts. I've often remarked that if the kind of planning and foresight we collectively put into the Halloween Party, Graduation, and Thursday Nights® were invested in the day-to-day operation of the school, the place might just start functioning like an institution of higher learning. Going here makes me appreciate just how well the U of MN functioned during my time there, a bizarre appreciation I never would have thought to have (a high-functioning monstrosity is far more dangerous than an inept one; I knew that about people, and now I know it about institutions). Partying seldom interested me at the ol' U because it was so anonymous and mindless; living literally steps from the epicenter at a school 25 times smaller is hard to resist, though, even if it is still rather mindless.

Frequent readers know that I'm prone to find the cynical angle anywhere I can, and so I hasten to add that I've had a tremendously productive and valuable three semesters here so far and am anticipating one of the more exciting, if harrowing, times of my musical life over the next six months or so. And being that tonight is the last Thursday of the semester, a momentary setting aside of all things cynical is indeed in order. It's a useful diversion and a terrible raison d'etre.

The Now-Annual Placeholder Post

Long day today. Terrible day for blogging. Sometimes the end of the semester clubs you over the head, and other times it's death by a thousand cuts. It's the latter case this time around: no big projects or papers, no flurry of recitals or gigs, just a seemingly endless list of one-time menial tasks (like, uh, writing a blog entry every day for a month). I have to admit, though, that it beats the alternative. Overcommitment is a problem all college music students face at some point, but I have to think CalArts is about the most dangerous place for it ever created. There is a clear pattern among the MFA students: smorgasbord first year, retrenchment second year. Guilty as charged, I am. It was a productive semester, though, and this is where I'm supposed to say I can't believe how quickly three semesters passed and I can't believe there's only one left. Actually, I can totally believe it. The school year runs from September to May; two years of school is bound to feel like less than two calendar years because, well, it is. That's as much a reason as any why I didn't apply to masters programs my last year of college, and why I'm not applying to doctoral programs right now. It can ruin your entire school year. I'm suspect I'm watching it happen to a couple of folks right now, unfortunately. Too bad. There will be plenty of time for that kind of thing after I've squeezed every last drop out of this this place. It's privilege that a lot of people don't have, and I wish more people here behaved that way.

The Ratio

CalArts is a place of many paradoxes, contradictions and plain old headscratchers, not the least of which is that a music school with such collective irreverence for academic rigor is also a well-known hotspot for JI/microtonal people, who tend by definition to be among the more academically rigorous musicians you'll ever meet. By "academically rigorous," I suppose I really mean "able and willing to do arithmetic in their heads," which normally isn't saying much, but anyone who's been to polite bourgie music school knows that, in this case, it is.

When I arrived at the U of MN, there still existed something called General College, which was essentially a community college within the university. This served two main purposes: it enabled the athletes to play Division I sports while doing junior college academics, and it enabled the undergraduate music majors to take what was understood to be a high school-level class in order to meet the single such requirement imposed by the College of Liberal Arts. (It was not math or science but the foreign language(!) requirement which was waived for music majors in order to accommodate the boatload of coursework within our major, a stunningly counterintuitive if not downright misguided decision; but then, if I'm allowed to embark on a discussion of the many "paradoxes, contradictions and plain old headscratchers" at the ol' U, Blog Month might spill into next year...so we'll leave it there for now.)

In Genesis of a Music, Harry Partch writes:

An acoustician writes in his book that Just Intonation is impossible of attainment in a practical system of music, a psychologist repeats this in his book, authors of harmony repeat it in their books, and finally a veritable army of theorists, composers, and instrumentalists repeats it verbally–of whom not one in a hundred thousand can speak from personal experience. (p. 424)

Such it is that the rest of the students here aren't always on board with this whole thing, up to and including what I perceive as downright defensive reactions to the notion that the study of tuning systems is actually relevant to people who work within one or more of them. It only seems more essential to me the more I learn about it, but I sometimes wonder if this won't actually be the last place on Earth to require such coursework of its music students, threatening as that requirement would to severely harm their buzz.

Semi-Annual Anti-Amplification Rant

I've lost track of how many times I've heard well-meaning live sound technicians and recording engineers state their unfaltering belief that the purpose of live sound reinforcement is simply to boost the overall level and not to balance the ensemble. And yet as numerous as these pronouncements are, they're not nearly as numerous as the number of small to medium-sized performance spaces which house a sound system.

A world in which one has recourse to sound reinforcement only to reinforce and not to balance is a world in which hard-wired sound systems are the exclusive domain of sports arenas and the great outdoors. In any case, sitting in CalArts' Roy O. Disney Concert Hall (misnamed really since most schools would call a room that size a "Recital Hall"), it occurs to me that I can count on one hand the number of instruments I've heard in person there or anywhere else which would truly require amplification in such a small space simply to be fully audible.

Of course, there are many fruitful musical endeavors (i.e. solo tuba with big band, to name one quite near if somewhat less dear), which artificial balancing enables; call them "works of fiction," as one of my frequent collaborators does. We'd be loathe to throw that baby out with the bathwater, and yet I'd gladly limit myself to working in "non-fiction" for the rest of my life if it meant I never again had to sit ten feet from a needlessly amplified grand piano.

Learning To Love You More Assignment #60

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

Bathroom Light In Room B-3 Left On Overnight

In testament to the high degree of self-absorption among art school graduate students and in spite of their lofty claims to be making the world a better place, the bathroom light in Ahmanson Hall room B-3 has been left on overnight for the third time in four days. Because all housing fees are paid in full at the beginning of the academic year, the steep electric bill which such behavior typically precipitates and which in turn tends to serve as its strongest deterrent will not be forthcoming, thus ensuring the light will be left on for hundreds more unnecessary hours yet this school year. All six residents of B-3 deny involvement in the matter and have no further comment at this time. Intra-suite discussion of the light has also been tabled indefinitely pending the development of sufficient resentment among the residents to engender further talks. Residents ask that the media respect their privacy during this difficult time. Requests for interviews will not be granted.

Doctor Doctor

There seems to be an entire office at CalArts devoted to spamming students with links to opportunities which may or may not be relevant to them, but a recent missive detailing four faculty vacancies at the University of Northern Colorado School of Music caught my eye, first because it's a school I've attended, but also because while it is made clear that candidates with doctorates are preferred, only one of the four announcements (for a position in voice of all things) takes a hard line.

For all the handwringing over the perception that "you practically need a doctorate to teach sixth grade nowadays," it's hard to find evidence of this without being on the inside of the search process. I've never attended a music school that didn't have a significant contingent of undoctored faculty in some of its highest-ranking positions, and I don't think I'd want to. It will be very interesting over the coming decades to see if everyone's dystopian visions of a perfectly insular academic music world come true, and further, given the present "tough economic times" and dwindling private financial support and return on investment for endowments and the like, whether admission to the doctorate club becomes even more a matter of buying oneself in than it already is.

A final word here about CalArts, to my knowledge one of the exceedingly few Art Schools with a music department, and at that, an Art School with exactly one doctoral program, in music. That us musicians would need to create more and more credentials for ourselves to earn makes perfect sense considering that we're typically said to be valued below most of the other arts; indeed, if the proverbial aliens landed, it wouldn't be difficult for them to infer the rest of the valuation landscape simply by noting the size, prestige and rigor of the other graduate programs here. And while academic credentials are by no means universally admired in contemporary American society, they are far more universally admired than any given art practice, and as the only such concrete acknowledgments of our existence available, artists simply crave them. You can no longer prove your worth to the world by making Great Art, but you can still break the socio-political ice in conversation with a red-stater by mentioning that you have a degree in what you do. I've done it many times, often to my surprise. This dynamic in and of itself is not necessarily to be lamented, but the feedback loops it might create within the actual realm of art and art-making give one pause.

Toward a New Isolation (i)

Solo (that is, "unaccompanied") tuba performance doesn't have much of a history, and what we do have is ill-suited to a building a career around. This music is, to start, just not good enough, but also neither long enough in duration nor modular enough in conception to be engaging for an entire set, let alone two or more of them in succession. The first question to ask, though, before getting too lathered up over the thought of finding a solution is whether there is a solution to be found at all. It's an uncomfortable question for a tubist (or any other musician) to face. We like to mumble something under our breath about the relative youth of our instruments, but even so, we've been around long enough that if something more interesting is ever to materialize, you'd think we would have at least sniffed it by now.

So, does unaccompanied tuba music suck because the composers writing it happen to suck, or is it because any and every composer sucks when forced to hew so closely to the severe limitations (both physical ones, which aren't going to change much, and conceptual ones, which better git to changin' in a hurry) we impose on them from the moment of a piece's conception? What the hell do you do when someone asks you to write an unaccompanied tuba piece? What can you do? I happen to believe that there is yet hope for truly "great" tuba music in a plethora of styles and settings, if not necessarily in unlimited quantities, and I would include music for tuba as an unaccompanied, unwired solo instrument therein. (In the "wired" domain, Robin Hayward's solo work with electronics is, to me at least, the most exciting development in solo tuba music in a long time. Too bad that the people most concerned with instrumental advocacy in the tuba world generally don't care for this kind of music.) I believe just as strongly that this music will not (cannot, actually) resemble the great violin, cello, flute, piano and saxophone repertoire as closely in its surface stylistic qualities as anyone familiar with truly exceptional instances of those various repertoires (including myself, I will admit) is liable to occasionally desire. And I do not believe, by the way, that the advent of this earth-shattering new tuba music "matters, " so to speak...but it does matter to me and maybe a few dozen other people in the world, some of whom don't know it yet.

A greater role for unaccompanied solo performance is just a small part of the overall equation. I do think that it is particularly overdue, though, and have thought that for several years. My reason for not pursuing it has simply been a matter of my intense attraction to and subsequent investment in polyphony. For years, the solo work was in my mind destined to be someone else's and not mine. Things can change quickly, though, and it all starts here: polyphony is, in addition to being beautiful, sophisticated, elegant, and all that stuff, also expensive, needy, difficult, fickle, contentious, perhaps even intractable. Polyphony is the homewrecker of the contemporary musico-social landscape: it's the really difficult stuff that haunted your adolescence and from which you finally, if you were lucky, made your escape in early adulthood; it's the stuff your JI friends tell you is all a big fat nineteenth century lie; it's the reeaally fun stuff that people who are reeaally good get paid reeaally well for, and therefore, that people who are just okay demand to get paid okay for. When compulsory academic ensemble participation assaulted your love of music in the back alley of student-to-faculty ratio gerrymandering, polyphony was the ski mask, the bludgeon, the smoking gun, the body bag...I could go on and on.

As perhaps you can tell, I have spent my entire compositional life, since tweendom, obsessing over polyphony, wondering why my peers and colleagues don't seem to be nearly so obsessed with it, and therefore beating my head against a long succession of proverbial walls while experiencing only fleeting moments of what I consider to be success. While I generally had my head on straight from an early age and never had worse than serviceable instruction and mentorship along the way, the number and fortitude of these walls was not something anything or anyone prepared me for. While it's too soon to give up completely, I finally decided a couple of years ago that I was overdue for a thorough consideration of any and all alternatives.

A cop-out you say? Absolutely. If my last cop-out had not proven so fruitful, I may not have seriously considered this one, but indeed, discovering the transformative nature of writing for open instrumentation changed more than my approach to orchestration: it opened me up to the possibility of further cop-outs. This latest one presents a remarkably similar scenario: in temporarily abandoning your first choice, you find that your second choice has the potential to make you better at everything you do, and also to be practical enough to stand a fighting chance of making it to the realization and documentation stages. This much I realized about solo playing years ago, but it didn't just occur to me randomly; indeed, my fixation on polyphony meant that it couldn't have. Rather, I had to become so bitter and frustrated trying to realize my ensemble music that I started to question whether I could be happy continuing in that vein for the rest of my life. I had to be driven, unfortunately by frustration in this case, to put every alternative on the table, and since monophonic solo playing more or less eliminates the part of music I value most, it was bound to be one of the very last resorts. (Socially, on the other hand, I suppose it's a bit surprising it didn't occur to me sooner.)

Musical predilections aside, there were external, "musico-social" factors which made me equally uncomfortable with the idea. Our present art music culture has been ravaged by these kinds of practical compromises: free jazz, for example, has been thoroughly co-opted and more or less absorbed into the jazz mainstream at this point not because these people saw the light but because they thought they saw an opportunity to perform without rehearsing; and of course, the tune-playing jazz mainstream itself remains terribly bogged down with third-rate lead sheet compositions which increasingly sound like parodies of themselves, and which, again, seem not to have been written so much out of personal artistic necessity as to be sight-readable on the bandstand. (You can challenge the drawing of causality here, but you can't deny that this is the path of least resistance right now, nor that there are lots of jazz musicians, including some very good ones who could be doing more interesting things, taking it frequently and unapologetically.)

Within my own aesthetic, a turn toward solo playing reeks of this kind of triangulating. I couldn't see much more in it than that for a long time, and I have to admit that part of me still feels that way. The greatest redeeming value here, I eventually realized, is that the tremendous conceptual and physical challenges it presents make incredible "cross training" for my other work which I'd be hard-pressed to duplicate any other way. That realization (I wouldn't be offended if we called it an excuse) finally got me thinking seriously about taking the plunge. Unfortunately, as soon as I had allowed myself to consider it, I realized that I was in far too deep, that too many people were relying on me to play in their ensembles, and that there was no hope of a socially graceful exit from only some of them that might allow me the time and space I needed to truly take this new direction.

This all began to play out in my head years ago, which is to say that I didn't come to California or to CalArts to become an unaccompanied tuba soloist: I came here, like I came into the world, full of false hope for a polyphonic consummation. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. I will say that CalArts really is just about as pluralistic as you've heard it is, and that this is a good thing, but when people out here say "Performer-Composer," most of them are not thinking first and foremost about Ellington or Prokofiev. There's no hostility here towards notated symphonic music, but nor is there any particular inertia in its favor, and I would venture that this is true of almost all of the many musical styles in play at the school. This actually is a problem, I think, the dark side of pluralism if you will, which is not to say that I in any way prefer the University of Minnesota's tyrannical conservatory approach, only that the alternative is not perfect either. A friend on the cusp of graduation in another discipline referred to her experience attending CalArts as "a scream into a void." My favored metaphor as a music student has been the "padded cell." All of that is to say that aesthetic pluralism can be a matter of eclecticism and condensation or it can be one of indifference, apathy and relativism; it can be active or passive, focused or distracted, a posture or a pose. CalArts seems to me to have largely (though not entirely) mitigated the friction which bogs down students at so many other schools, and along with it any hope of traction either, if that makes any sense.

A further problem, regardless of commitment, is that of community. In my eyes, the concept of postmodern fragmentation of culture, or the idea that everyone now has their own style of music, like a Pandora station, is felt no less acutely by those of us making the music than by those who only listen to it, and more specifically, by those musicians whose work is inherently collaborative. It often seems to me that the very possibility of "like minds" has dwindled down to almost zero: the erosion of common practice (or any possibility of it), the sheer quantity of music being made and the ease of distributing and acquiring it all mean that no two musicians show up to school, work or play with much in common, nor, more importantly, with any obvious way to compel each other to pretend to beyond the possibility of a paycheck.

What is particularly crippling about this condition is that our polemics have fragmented along with our aesthetics. Rarely, then, are battles fought by people my age over concepts as global as absolute versus program music or over styles as different as serialism and minimalism. (Of course, many of the principals of that last one are still alive, but again, I'm talking about people under 30). Rather, we seem doomed to bicker over comparatively subtle, internecine questions. In Minneapolis at least, a "free jazz" group that uses a little bit of written music will have an easier time opening for a commercial rock band than getting booked on a series run by "improvised music" people who are militantly anti-notation. Groups that once actively despised each other (surely some continue to anyway) now play off each other's novelty value and trade "street cred," whereas close musical constituencies are torn apart by comparatively subtle artistic differences.

In a post-common-practice era, challenges to our musical ways of life have to hit particularly close to home to so much as appear to be directed at us at all, and as such, we tend to end up in engaged in actual conflicts with our friends more often than our enemies. It is certainly true that the older "global" issues often underly the contemporary "local" conflicts I'm describing; my point remains that these "local" conflicts are greater in number and, by definition, fought among people who really should be working together rather than, as I think you could argue about many of the older polemics, among people who really shouldn't. (Alternatively, it can and will be argued that people my age and younger don't argue over the big ideas because the internet has made us into shallow thinkers with short attention spans. Consider yourselves warned that the more I hear that, the longer and more verbose my blog posts will become.)

Put another way, even if you disagree that these subtle differences in experience and taste are as crippling as I am making them out to be, perhaps you'll agree that the empowerment of the individual in absence of monolithic tradition wielded as a bludgeon in the various bygone manners of species counterpoint, serialism or bebop means that seemingly minor aesthetic differences can become comparatively magnified by what might be variously called ego, self-determinism, artistic vision, or whatever. That musicians with nearly identical backgrounds can arrive at vastly different aesthetics is a beautiful thing, and as such long-overdue in Western musical culture. What's not so beautiful is that they likely will also come to irreparably despise each other, and only more acutely precisely for having both laid claim to the same confluence of ideas. With biodiversity comes competition, predation, and familiarity breeding contempt, and hence what might once have been called like-mindedness instead becomes internecine strife.

Many students come to CalArts to start over, and some in fact to start for the first time. If they so much as behave themselves, they leave with a NASM accredited degree and five- or six- figure student debt regardless of what they've accomplished academically or artistically. (If this doesn't bother you on some level or another, you must be either an arts administrator, an elected official, or both.) A professor here told me after my audition that, "People come here to become what you already are." Flattered as I was, and, for some reason, in no way dissuaded from enrolling, the aforementioned fragmentation of aesthetics was already on my mind. In the broadest sense, everyone in the Performer-Composer program is here for remarkably similar reasons, but our specific orientations are incredibly diverse. It seems to me looking around the room each week during our forum that we don't work with each other nearly as much as with students from the "straight" performance and composition programs, who might better serve our specific purposes, have less of an aesthetic axe to grind, and let's face it, generally need stuff to do. I don't think this is a coincidence.

So, here I am, casualty of the postmodern condition, one unlike mind among many, the polyphonic guy who got stuck with the monophonic instrument, the misanthrope who who hitched his life's wagon to a collaborative art, the lines-and-dots composer who enrolled at the accredited American music school with the most improvisors per capita, and the graduate student who showed up there in order to consolidate all of this, not to start over. Suffice it to say, though, that given the already mounting frustration I faced on many of these same fronts in Minneapolis, I did arrive in California with both a very clear picture of what starting over could look like and an exceedingly short fuse when it comes banging my head against the wall that stands between me and my polyphonic dreams. That fuse ran out sometime in February, and I've since begun my first serious investigation of unaccompanied solo performance. The above (yes, all of it) is merely an introduction in light of which I want to share, in the next missive, some early reflections on this process, which I believe is headed for a very fruitful, if hard-won, consummation.

Same Difference (iii) – some comic relief re: the fashion issue

I haven't ventured to L.A. all that much since I've been at CalArts, but when I have, the heightened importance of grooming has frequently been in evidence. The first time I saw a musician sporting the more or less archetypal musico-hipster outfit from the neck down in combination with the perfectly trimmed goatee and freshly styled hair of an accountant, I knew I wasn't in Kansas (or Minnesota) anymore.

Same Difference (ii)

From an early stage in my musical development, I refused to embrace the expression of anything in particular as a worthy goal for music (mine or others'), and I haven't given much ground in the intervening years. It was at first merely a fact that I had not consciously or intentionally endowed any of my music with extra-musical content; only later did I become convinced through experience (can we just call it common sense?) that reverse-engineering the emotional impact of a particular piece on a particular person for the purpose of reconstituting it at will was, regardless of my own degree of interest in doing so, an absolutely impossible task. Such it is that "expression" in the colloquial sense in which that term is used by musicians and music-lovers remains more or less beyond the pale in my own work. Taken in the very most imprecise, deconstructed, overbroad sense, however, I'm not sure I can deny it completely.

My own social alienation has never been as simple as just being a painfully shy kid. I am a "blender," a "fly on the wall" almost wherever I go; I hear lots of things not meant for my ears; I startle roommates working in the kitchen who didn't see or hear me approach; I can sit at a bar for 20 minutes and not get served. When I stop to consider whether all of this might be, as most anyone I might relate this to is bound to respond, "all in my head," that it is more or less universal to the human experience and that what makes me different is not so much that it happens to me as how it affects me, I simply can't convince myself. Pushing 30, I'm both more convinced than ever that it's real and more disappointed than ever that I haven't managed to parlay this unteachable skill into a more lucrative and exciting career as an international jewel thief or double agent. It's getting harder and harder, though, to imagine that the career choices I have made cannot be partially explained in this way either.

To play tuba under these conditions is to both transcend and compound the problem. Depending on the acoustic and social environments at hand, the instrument may command undivided attention or it may be exceptionally easily ignored. It may be painfully loud or completely inaudible. In attempting complete musical statements where incomplete ones are no less than idiomatic and conventionalized, you will either wildly exceed the audience's expectations in your success, or, paradoxically, reinforce them even more strongly in failure at this loftier task than you ever could have by simply attempting that which they will continue to expect. I find that this mirrors my social experience quite closely, and if that does not really explain why I first became a tuba player, I think it might explain, at least in part, why I am still a tuba player today. You have to learn to live with your successes and failures alike being met with indifference; with being too loud for one kind of music you love and too quiet for another, and with being happy enough if someone so much as notices that one or the other is the case. These are not good feelings, but I knew them quite well from the hallways, the school bus and the baseball field long before I knew that music was my calling. So here I am, relatively unharmed, but not entirely at peace either.

The tuba is big and shiny and low and loud, superficial qualities which might get you noticed for a second, but won't hold anyone's attention much beyond that. Indeed, there's music (art, we hope) to be made on the tuba, and also on hundreds of other instruments. Art will not get you noticed by very many people, of course, but the few who do engage with your work will remember it for a long time. And as any good student of Music Business will tell you, the extent to which you are "different" is more or less directly proportional to the duration and intensity of this memory. This much, I think, was clear to me from the outset, if not on the most elementary, intuitive level, and I would not aspire to mislead anyone based on the first entry in this series that this was not the case. It may even be fair to say that my work on some abstract level represents an "expression of difference," in other words, something people actually notice even as I myself remain (socially) easy to ignore. What I simply can't abide are the more concrete, overbearing, self-absorbed forays into this realm, the ones which simply shove this supposed "difference" that all of us artists suffer with right in the audience's proverbial face, necessarily dragging along those trivial personal details which are its necessary vessels of delivery. Are we not already different enough simply for making art, regardless of its content? And really, don't we like it that way?