Conquering Dependence on Necessary Evils

One day as a high-schooler writing music on my Dad's PowerMac, I discovered that ConcertWare had a meter called "Free Time." Thus began an abiding compositional habit of periodically dispensing with barlines. Having now seen much more printed music and made many more forays (not totally successful ones) into hand-written/mind's-ear composition, it is always a bit embarrassing to think back to moments like this, when composing was for me something of a video game. Whether the software thus encouraged that impressionable young person to play fast and loose with convention or whether it merely allowed him to is a question of framing rather than of substance, and one which composers will answer more according to our own orientations rather than according to reality. Since the reality was in my particular case lost to the sands of time without anyone (including myself) caring nearly as much as composers seem to care about this issue in the abstract, perhaps this is just fine. Admittedly, from the perspective of a more experienced quasi-teacher attending to a hypothetical student, I would not be totally at ease with such a process now. Yet the same hindsight shows that there were at least two undeniably propitious elements in my case: (a) the ease and accessibility of this feature exploded a hitherto unquestioned convention rather than rigidifying it, and (b) ConcertWare undeniably handled unmetered notation far more flexibly than Finale, Sibelius or MuseScore do, even now.

It is true that such departures can be made too easy as well as too difficult, depending on the technical intermediary and the cultural atmosphere. It is also true that frequent interface with printed music outside of one's computing life has a way of diluting the computer's influence over notational decisions. I was fortunate as a tween to at least be seeing printed music in band class, and occasionally tripping over stacks of it at home. I suppose it was only later, when I realized that composers, publishers and conductors I had heard of (or at least a few of them) were open (or at least not irrevocably opposed) to temporarily dispensing with barlines, and when I encountered my first gentle opposition to this practice on the part of other musicians, that my decision thereby became something of an informed decision, taken freely. And when a beloved college wind band conductor habitually referred to barlines as "a necessary evil" in rehearsal, as an idealist I of course heard "evil" more than "necessary," and at that point all barline bets were off.

Unmetered notation remains controversial, even among the most seasoned and fluent musicians. Periodically I have occasion to pause and reflect on this situation, and it occurs to me now that there is a significant connection here to another Style Wars polemic which bubbles up occasionally: the question of learning one's part from notation as against learning it via aural transmission. In addition to asking for unmetered music to sound a certain way, by writing unmetered passages composers are asking the player to do some extra work; perhaps to figure out for themselves, by shedding, where the barlines might be if they had been used; perhaps to become familiar enough with (essentially, to memorize) the passage such that the coordinating function of the barline is superfluous; and perhaps therefore not to concern themselves with what other players' parts might be asking of them, nor with how those other players might handle those demands, including the possibility (within reason) of different grouping/phrasing in different parts. There is more to unmetered passages than the possibility of multiple "correct" meterings or the absence of composerly guidance (not to say intent) on said point: there is, more importantly, a practice, rehearsal, and performance process which is mediated by a notational decision. The result of this now-changed process is what I am seeking with unmetered passages. I am not seeking a "perfect" rendition as if barlines had been deployed and subsequently observed by unusually adept players or by a machine. I am, in a sense, actually going out of my way to avoid this.

Process is the only reason that the performance of unmetered music might, potentially (hopefully?), sound different than if the music were metered; getting music to sound a certain way is the only logical reason to depart from received notational convention; and departing from received notational convention is a good way (if not the only way) to shake up the performance process. This is the kind of procedural perfect circle that composers dream about, and usually only dream about. If the "process" merely consists of the performers staying 5 minutes after the first rehearsal to compare parts and draw in uniform barlines, then we can still say that the notation has mediated the process, and that the music might still sound different than if the composer had provided the same information to them from the outset. But this amounts to normalizing/conventionalizing what was non-normative about the piece in order to make it easier to play. That maneuver is the domain of Jobbing, not of Artistry. Shedding also makes any given piece easier to play, regardless of notation, and invites the reflection which breathes life into Dead Tree composition. It is socially ungraceful to point this out in a world where Everyone Is Busy and there is already plenty of music to listen to. I accept that judgment on a cosmic level. On an earthly level, meanwhile, I see unexplored/neglected aesthetic avenues hiding in plain sight and conjecture that they might be fun to explore. So come fly with me, or whatever.

Reflection tends to be baked into the process of aural transmission, and it tends to be eschewed (usually almost totally) by users of notation. This I do not deny, but I do choose to find fault with the users rather than with the notation. Thus for me the basis for preferring one mode of transmission to another is a matter of what I might want to do with it, not what everyone else thinks everyone else is doing with it. Modes of transmission are mere vehicles for the realization of the abstract concept of a work; it is the concept which indicates favorably or poorly for either process, not the other way around. Notation is all about expedience, and this is both its best and worst quality. Notation allows Eye Players to realize music without reflecting on it, perhaps even, as the figure of speech would have it, without even thinking about it. Owing to innumerable big-picture factors which are best set aside for now, this is normally exactly what happens (or doesn't happen). Certainly no one is more puzzled by or discontent with this situation than I am, and I will not be out-discontented by partisans of Ear traditions who choose to resolve this structure-agency question one-sidedly. It is true that the structure here (the notational system) is what enables users to become passive re-creators, but it is not true that it imposes passive re-creation, nor that the etiology of passive re-creation is entirely or even mostly a matter of the notational system, nor that the notational system has nothing more to offer us than the shortest on-ramp to the path of least resistance. If any given Eye Player chooses to reflect upon their Eye Music, they will find every bit as much to reflect upon as will the ear player upon theirs. If they neglect to take this opportunity where it presents itself, then my heart bleeds for them.

Writing without barlines aims at imposing a process that is intermediate between the rhetorical extremes of the Ear Player who is forced into a reflective outlook by the laboriousness of their process and the Eye Player who habitually tears through piles of written music without any reflection whatsoever because Everyone Is Busy and reflection would slow them down. Writing without barlines aims at imposing selective reflection by omitting small pieces of customary information, while nonetheless providing all the other information that written music customarily provides.

Notation doesn't breed soulless performance; rather, soulless performers gives soulless performances. Unfortunately this conclusion has become unavoidable as Ear Playing increasingly carries the day and soullessness remains rampant. Yes, Everyone Is Busy, and so there aren't too many bands around today where everyone really commits to the Mingus process. We're so Busy, actually, that the dwindling repertory has moved decisively away from anything even as structurally specific as Haitian Fight Song. The overdetermination of musical structure by social structure is a material question, not an expressive or metaphysical one. You cannot claim the exquisite-corpse process as an affirmative creative decision when your five band members have moved to five different states! You cannot claim notational or conceptual simplicity as an affirmative creative decision when you know that no one is willing to rehearse! I am not saying that you cannot succeed under these circumstances. What I am saying is that you cannot claim success.

When process is materially circumscribed from the outset, concept can only trail at a distance. It is unideal for process to lead concept in this way because all processes are conceptually limiting. Ideally the creator of the work would have taken account of this from the embryonic stage of creation, identifying a process which best serves their concept while working around the inevitable potholes. That is, ideally the mediation between process and concept takes place though the creative process itself, not in sequence with one consideration leading the other around by the scruff of the neck after the piece is "done." When process dictates to concept, its flaws and slippages are foregrounded anywhere the creator is unwilling to sacrifice concept to expedience. On one hand, this unwillingness is socially maladaptive; on the other hand, it is one leading indicator of the presence of a soul. Hence owing to unconscious self-other identifications that even educated citizens of enlightened post-industrial societies are subject to, this unwillingness to compromise tends to be rewarded by the soulful and punished by the soulless. And that's where we're at!

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.

Toward a New Isolation (iv)

The previous discussion of tone production is really a microcosm of my experience with all issues of traditional versus extended techniques. Despite having spent much less time perfecting the few that I use regularly as an improvisor, I find many extended techniques much easier to mold into an unaccompanied musical presentation on the spot. The equal-tempered pitch grid remains the greatest challenge for me, both technically and conceptually, despite both a decent helping of natural ability in this area and my disproportionate investment in it. Jacobs' admonition to "become a singer in our brains" is easier said than done, and there simply is no tougher test of the degree to which a brass player has achieved this than melodic/harmonic improvisation in a particular temperament. (Sorry to break it to you that way orchestral folk...you really should try it sometime!) Hence, though I've occasionally defended heavy use of extended brass techniques against charges of charlatanism, I readily confess to a certain irreverence for their technical challenges in comparison to traditional classical and jazz demands. I raise all of this not to claim some kind of moral-technical high ground, but rather to begin to sort out some of the implications for the present endeavor.

In one sense, this has not been the happiest realization I've made throughout this process. I've felt for a while as both a player and composer that in the grand scheme of things, I'm overdue for an infusion of recent musical innovations in extended techniques, notation, temperament, and technology, and thus that any excuse to remedy these deficiencies would be a welcome one. The inhibiting factor is that I tend to feel as if I have too much unfinished business in the traditional areas, which will remain important me and are also notoriously needy. There's no threshold in brass playing beyond which you can simply check tone production off the list of things to work on; rather, it sometimes seems as if you have to reinvent it on a daily basis. Conversely, I can name (though I won't) quite a few accomplished/high-profile drummers and bass players who I've heard relate quite the opposite story (and always in front of a room full of students, since that's where the question gets asked): they practice for many hours a day for several years as teens and young adults, and then essentially replace that practice time with rehearsal and performance for the rest of their careers. Some of them purportedly never "practice" again! It sounds awfully suspicious to a brass player, that is until they start to play; we then hear for ourselves that that (a) their technique hasn't eroded the way ours would under those circumstances, and (b) their ensemble sensitivity is positively off the charts. I don't know how we replicate this, but we had better find a way if we ever want to be able to sit at these cats' lunch table. It's no wonder we get so far behind: we're off by ourselves playing long tones and lip slurs while they're applying and integrating their technique with a live band of similarly accomplished players.

I now play more jazz and know more about it than I do classical music, which was not the case for quite a while, and whether as a cause or effect of this, I slowly realized that I'm also much better at it. I peaked as a classical player at 22 when I made it to the finals of the WAMSO competition and in my mind have never quite gotten back to that level, even while surpassing it in another style. The thought of abandoning classical technique completely occurs to me all the time, but I just can't; there's too much I still want to do with it, too much that it's good for in the music I like. What I'd really like to abandon for good is classical music culture: for all the foibles of the jazz world, the incredible difficulty in securing even minor opportunities from classically-oriented institutions, the vicissitudes of dealing with classical musicians, their spectacular lack of artistic proaction, and the incredible stylistic inertia they exert all add up to a jive scene. But all of that aside, I've had to admit that what they do is harder for me than I originally thought, or at least on a consistently high level, and also that my own disillusionment with the culture of orchestras and orchestral audition preparation clouded my view of these players' true skill for some time. Of course, the vast majority of them would find what I do to be nearly impossible as well, but that's no comfort: my vision has always been to cover all the bases, which seemed more doable when I was being forced by classical music school to specialize in the things that have turned out to be the most difficult.

In any case, I think that the greater accessibility of extended techniques in improvised settings, whether real or imagined, is ultimately just another reflection of that old trope about the "primal" nature of rhythm versus the "intellectual" nature of pitch, and I think it's also indisputable that brass players and singers, whose bodies themselves rather than some external object are the source of vibration, face a particular challenge in this regard. I have always had an excellent ear, but pitch remains the most difficult musical parameter for me to truly control when playing, both in terms of successions of pitches and of their individual fine tuning. I have an awfully hard time spontaneously realizing interesting successions of exact pitches, but substantially less trouble when working in a blurrier pitch grid, as when half-valving, playing with a loose seal on the mouthpiece, or playing with a tuning slide removed. For one thing, this would figure to free up any mental "bandwidth" that is otherwise tied up in fine adjustments of lip pressure, choice of alternate fingerings, and accounting for differences in response and the intonational tendencies of partials. There is an enduring conceit that great performers don't really think about those kinds of things on stage which I've never found entirely convincing, but in any case, even the smallest amount of bandwidth can be awfully valuable.

Truthfully, the techniques I listed as examples above do sometimes strike me as too facile. I say that not out of some obstinate self-denial impulse, but rather because I just don't think that the sound of a tuba or a trumpet with the main tuning slide removed is worth an entire set or album. No matter how fluent, personal or expressive the removal of the pitch grid barrier enables the music to be, fighting the instrument for a sound it was not designed to make can be just as inhibiting, and further, the tendency to accept a sound as essential simply because it is available is, I think, actually a danger. It seems to me that there is little unique or essential about most of these sounds, and also that this is entirely predictable given the painstaking design and construction of these instruments for entirely different purposes. If anyone out there just adores the sound of hitting the mouthpiece on the bell, I've got nothing for you; that one in particular has always baffled me, though I admit to having resorted to it myself in a few moments of weakness over the years. I realize that if you're an improvising tuba player, you walk out on stage with a tuba and see what happens, and this means that if a piece develops which at some point simply demands a metallophone and your bell and mouthpiece are the only ones on stage at the time, then you are to cooperate with the spirits and provide said metallophone(s) as only you can. That being the case, I suspect that there are any number of easier, cheaper, more portable, less risky, and to boot, far more attractive potential sound sources we might experiment with if the soundworld of extended brass techniques is to comprise the core of our musical identity. Going after them directly means the opportunity to find Just The Right One, this as opposed to merely settling for the closest thing you can coax out of your main axe simply because it's what you're stuck with at the moment. And really, how many improvising percussionists have you heard using an old trombone bell and mouthpiece as part of their setup? Certainly not enough to make me wonder if I'm missing something on that front.

It's not lost on me that, like "learning on the job," making due in this way is verging on a traditional process at this point in Improvised Music history, just one of many consequences of the unpredictability that those of us true believers insist is this music's best quality against those who would argue the opposite. And yet there is an equally rich history of multi-instrumentalism in this music which I think speaks to the realization by many great masters that if anything could happen, they had better be prepared for it. I have occasionally heard performances by instrumentalists who use no traditional tone production whatsoever, and while the music is often engaging, it can also be exceedingly generic (not "derivative," but "generic" in the sense that the sounds could have been obtained many different ways besides the way they were obtained in these particular concerts; that is to say, with instruments other than those which were used). I rarely feel that such music could only have been made, or made best, by the tools that the musician(s) chose to bring on stage with them that night. I think that's the crucial question for all of us to ask ourselves. When the exponents of a particular field of artistic endeavor where "anything is possible" begin to converge rather than diverge, it's time to change our underwear.

If I'm going to put up with the vicissitudes of being a tuba player, it's going to be in exchange for something that only the tuba can provide; otherwise, there's no point in suffering through all of this. The only valid reason for using the tuba to get the sound you want is that you can only get that sound from the tuba, and by definition, this is less likely to be the case the further you stray from traditional tone production and more likely the closer you hew to it. There surely are many more sounds hiding in the tuba than most of us have thought to use, and I don't begrudge anyone the right to avail themselves of them; I would, however, argue for a very high standard of uniqueness, one that suits our postmodern condition and oversaturated musical landscape. It's important to realize that the kind of music I'm discussing, unfamiliar or alienating as it may remain to many, is in any case not new anymore. These pieces need something else to distinguish them from other forms and from each other. (That goes double for all you tuba missionaries: there's plenty of low-hanging fruit right under your nose here in Newmusicland if you ever get tired of playing opera overtures and Journey covers.) For my part, the fact that I generally use pitch-blurring extended techniques sparingly has more to do with my strong predilections for harmony and the traditional tuba sound than anything else. I've basically accepted a hierarchy in my music whereby the further the "extension" of technique required, the more sparingly that sound is used. I've always been much more interested in finding Just The Right Note than Just The Right Sound, which is why extended techniques have remained peripheral to my work to this point.

Toward a New Isolation (ii)

While the thought of making a vital and coherent unaccompanied musical statement doesn't scare me much when I'm part of a larger ensemble or program, the thought of sustaining it for an entire set (even a short one) can be terrifying. Whether a matter of real-time or suspended-time composition, the task becomes increasingly daunting as one's durational aspirations escalate. When composers speak of the challenges of "large-scale forms," they are likely referring not only to durational but also orchestrational scale, and, more importantly, to the relationship between the two. Depending on how it is deployed, the sonic variety afforded by large forces can add variety to a lengthy piece or obliterate the unity of a shorter one. An unaccompanied solo concert on a monophonic instrument is a similarly extreme case, pairing as it does maximum duration with minimum orchestration. This in large part explains the difficulty of such concerts for performer and audience alike, and similarly, the rarity with which this challenge is embraced and met by players of monophonic instruments.

In the previous post, I outlined several reasons why I've decided to undertake just such a project. Notably absent, you may have noticed, were any specific ways I intend to address this basic problem, nor did I claim anything resembling an abiding love of monophonic solo music. Solutions and affinities both will need to be discovered along the way, which for me is a foreign way of working (as is knowing from the outset that one or both could fail to materialize). One of my teachers asked whether I thought if x or y great musician had been a tuba player they could have pulled this off. Obviously, we'll never know, and it's better that way: for one thing, it's foolhardy to assume that any of the musicians whose names you might invoke in this capacity would have been equally well-suited to just any instrument or tradition; further, those of us who might otherwise be tempted to lament the fact that none of them were tuba players can take solace in knowing that there's still something experimental, Modernist, essential, dare I say new out there for us tubists to research and aspire to.

To be sure, this is a subtle and not a revolutionary newness, but I think it is palpable and worth mapping anyway. When your instrument has become a dubious luxury item, and not least for the very musical culture which spawned it, any questions that still need answering are important questions, and work that needs doing is important work. And at the risk of contradicting my obstinate aversion to allowing aesthetic factors to be mediated by social ones, I wholeheartedly admit that the more complete self-determination of the solo endeavor is, for the moment, by far its most attractive feature, certainly more so than any actual artistic vision I've yet managed to pin down. This is, after all, a kind of autonomy not typically granted to monophonic musicians, nor even truly considered available to us in many traditions; who knows, then, what kind of constructive havoc we might wreak on both the tradition and our own oeuvres by rightfully claiming it? The thought is exciting enough that I'm willing to temporarily compromise my absolutist tendencies in order to find out if this excitement is justified.

So, where to start? My first concentrated investigations have been conducted through the lens of improvisation. It had been clear to me for some time just from the extremely limited amount of noodling I had done in a few idle practice room moments that solo improvisation isn't something you just sit down and do, even if you're an experienced ensemble improvisor, for each presents unique challenges that the other does not. No sooner can I type that, though, than I become acutely aware that this statement marks me as something of a conservative in what tends to be an ultra-liberal landscape: there is after all in improvised music what at this point can only be called a tradition of learning on the job, as well as a thoroughly irreverent attitude toward Uptowner angst over compositional "problems" like that of orchestrational versus durational scale. Having worked extensively with militants from both ends of this spectrum, I've often found it to be a highly polarized one. I fancy myself something of a peacemaker on this front and have embraced certain aspects of each aesthetic, but I ultimately register somewhere on the center-right than straight down the middle. In any case, in solo performance, you can't just go along with what everyone else is doing, which means I'm finding out what I think about a few things that were only ever peripheral to my ensemble endeavors.

To start, it bears mentioning that I've come to strongly favor traditional techniques of tone production as foundations on which to expand, this following in part from the realization that subverting my classical training has proven far easier than the process of developing it. If I want an airy sound, I can play out of the side of my mouth, open a water key, set a tuning slide ajar, and on and on; if I want indeterminate microtonality, I can engage the fifth valve and play with the other four as I would normally. If this sounds suspiciously facile, perhaps it is: part of why I find these techniques more accessible than classical tone production is because my classical sound concept is exceedingly specific while the outcomes I'm seeking through these techniques are much vaguer and mostly defined negatively (i.e. in opposition to the "classical" ideal). These are, in fact, techniques which I've developed almost exclusively "on the job" while on stage with improvising ensembles and spent much less time "practicing" by myself. To be sure, the pursuit of very particular airy tones or off-kilter temperaments would entail much more work and undoubtedly prove much more elusive than I'm claiming my versions have. It does confound me, though, that despite my disproportionate investment in traditional technique, it remains a greater challenge.

Of course, more and more musicians from all across the musical spectrum are proclaiming an authentic dislike for the "refined" instrumental sounds of classical music. Oddly enough, it seems to me that the pop music people tend to be among the more intelligent and level-headed about this; in any case, it is intuitively clear even to me as a relatively uninitiated (and uninterested) listener why these sounds don't suit most mainstream pop and rock very well. I find the venomous anti-classical ravings of the improv world, supposedly founded on the principle that anything is possible, to be far more arbitrary and confounding. As best I can gather, there are two primary explanations (unsurprisingly, both are non-aesthetic and conjectural): one is the association of classical music with Europeanism, colonialism, oppression, The Dominant Ideology, and so on; the other is the assumption that classical training does as much to prevent non-classical possibilities as it does to enable classical ones. The first issue is far too treacherous to elaborate upon at the moment. I trust that if you have strong opinions on this that you know where to look for further enlightenment, and also that there is not here. The second issue, conversely, is something I've returned to again and again in this space and even so have no shame in returning to yet again, though I have a slightly more qualified response to offer in this particular case.

While the classical method of tone production remains my default setting, I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that this reflects a choice I have made for myself rather than one that my teachers and training have made for me. I don't believe that the classical training I have had has either physically or conceptually closed me off from exploring a variety of alternative methods of tone production, even if my sparing use of these alternatives might innocently suggest the opposite. In fact, I often hesitate to apply phrases like "classically trained" to myself at all, since I was almost purely self-taught in the area of technique for the first four years I played brass, didn't have my first tuba lesson until the age of 15, and, as my teachers surely would tell you, have never fully assimilated the total package of standard orchestral brass methods. Even so, I did more or less adopt the sound ideal once it was presented to me in the standard way and have spent most of the last dozen years pursuing it, albeit through a hodge-podge of self-taught and standardized techniques.

If you insist, I suppose you're entitled to speculate that I merely accepted what I was being told by an authority and that I'm mired so deep in this subversion of my own identity as to have become unable to perceive the reality of the situation. We should all at least be willing to consider that possibility, and also considered qualified to dismiss it: it is far too easy an accusation for us to level at each other, not to mention for an outsider to level against an entire musical tradition in which they have no interest or investment. It is awfully presumptuous to reduce an individual's entire life experience to tidy packages like "classically trained" or "academically credentialed" based on limited observation. I would posit that we're all guilty of these kinds of snap judgments on a daily basis, appearing as they do to be simply a part of our human wiring. For my part, I don't consider myself to be either a pure autodidact or purely classically trained, and yet when in the company of one group, it is without fail the other factor by which I am most strongly identified, labeled and remembered.

I am certainly not disputing that classical music culture tends to be obstinately absolutist about tone production, for that it most certainly is; yet based on my own time in accredited classical music schools (something I've actually experienced that the woolliest improv heads have not), I do think that, ultimately, the seeming triumph of this absolutism speaks overwhelmingly to the tremendous poverty of imagination among these students, which itself ultimately speaks more to the unsustainable size and scope of contemporary accredited, degree-granting musical academia in the United States than it does to the pedagogy that prevails therein. There simply are not enough dedicated, inspired, self-motivated students with which to populate this voracious institution, and at the point when schools are growing enrollment simply to generate revenue, one can no longer make facile observations about the efficacy of their curricula by simply examining the end results. For the overwhelming majority of these students, there's no personal artistic necessity at work, nothing whatsoever compelling them to pursue some musical ideal which exists in its truest form only in their imagination; in other words, there is no voice here for advanced classical training to stifle. I did not always see it that way, especially regarding composition, but time and perspective have changed my views.

I myself was among the most suspicious and disillusioned of classical music majors, and often profoundly unhappy, but it was no more lost on me at the time than it is now that I was being presented an opportunity for a certain kind of growth which was important to the musical vision I was beginning to develop, and which I would have been a fool to turn my back on for fear of becoming a mindless technician or a servant of The Dominant Ideology. (Though I would, like all of us, claim to be among the worthier of music students, the fact that I jumped through every hoop in the mindless technician curriculum with room to spare and yet still can't touch the mindless technicians one encounters on the professional level speaks again to my point about over-enrollment.) The University of Minnesota was far from the ideal place for me; it may in fact have been the worst place in the world for me to go to music school. Even so, while it may have stifled me socially, I can't say that it stifled me musically. There certainly were opportunities I didn't have there that I could have had elsewhere, but the ones that did exist were no less relevant to my goals, and even my most resentful investments in them have continued to pay dividends.

The whole issue of classical training begetting conformity is in my view frequently mischaracterized in the most obstinate corners of the improv world, where, not coincidentally, first-hand, in-person observation of the people and institutions under discussion tends to be in notably short supply. In any case, the trope about virtuoso clones is, if not necessarily an inaccurate surface observation about the classical world, more or less equally applicable to the improv world, which has now been around long enough for us to observe a similarly high degree of uniformity and predictability among these musicians (at which I imagine their pioneering forerunners who are still alive can only cringe). There sure are an awful lot of self-proclaimed rugged individualist brass improvisors who all play flat on the fifth partial. This is not in any way to say that music which uses flat fifth partial tones is necessarily bad music, only that many of these players' lofty claims to negative freedom are overstated. Conformity, it turns out, is not so easily pinned solely on the Uptowners: it does not simply disappear in absence of the will to impose it, nor in the presence of the mere stated intent to escape it. Seriously, how many times have we all heard from improv detractors that "all that shit sounds the same" and had no way to respond aside from assuring them that what they just heard wasn't the real shit? This is not just a classical music or an improvised music issue.

You've probably heard the same stories I have about classical teachers forbidding their students to play jazz, especially early on in jazz's history; ironic, then, that a remarkably similar line of thought prevails today in certain improvised music circles regarding classical technique itself. It's too bad that we, collectively, have not yet managed to debunk this myth from either side of the divide, but that's probably because trained-monkeyism on the one hand and laziness on the other are as timeless and endemic to human civilization as music itself. This makes it appear as if pan-stylism is fiendishly difficult when in reality it is merely a matter of dedication and balance. Similarly, to believe that great hordes of latent musical visionaries are being stifled by academic dogmatism is so often merely a desperate attempt to reconcile an overly idealistic view of human creativity with a lack of tangible evidence to support it. Again, the actual problem, if it is one, is that there are not nearly this many visionaries available for today's vastly overgrown classical music academia to stifle. (Of course, I would be remiss not to mention this angle as well.) I do believe that there are better ways to train musicians, that there are methods which are predisposed to open stylistic doors without closing them, and that there is a certain concurrent depth of experience as both a listener and a player which will make this process not merely accessible but in fact inevitable. No one would like to see classical music academia embrace these methods more than I would, and that's because I've lived in it; by leveling criticism, I hope to redeem this music and these institutions, not condemn them. I'm awfully tired of people who know only a little bit about the products and nothing whatsoever about the process taking these perceived shortcomings as indictments of the entire classical music tradition, mere collateral damage in a voracious search for authoritative-sounding zingers with which to validate their own tastes.

I am not writing to argue for the inherent supremacy of the classical sound, but merely to declare my embrace of it as one possible acceptable sound in an improvised piece; indeed, as a sound which I freely choose to rely upon heavily even having developed a handful of alternatives, and in no way simply hewing to the intolerant classical tuba teacher I never had; and to locate that position in the current musico-philosophical landscape as I've experienced it anecdotally. If there is a rational justification for a player to seek refinement of their sound, it is that this represents one way to move beyond the lowest hanging technical fruit, and therefore, one hopes, to conform less, not more. Regardless of the particular sound in question, this kind of refinement presents an inherently steeper learning curve, certainly much steeper than one could hope to climb without substantial off-stage practice time. For this reason, I think that classical players actually tend to have access to the greatest variety of sounds; whether or not they choose to use them is a cultural question, not a technical one. And in the case of unaccompanied monophonic solo playing, I would take tonal variety as a fundamental value a priori, with timbre, which is far less important to me as a symphonic composer, taking on a heightened importance. I see most of the possible sounds brass instruments can make as accessible from a variety of points on the classical training continuum while the classical sound itself seems to be accessible only to those who have invested disproportionately in it. Your mileage may vary, but in my case, not even the obstinate autodidact part of me has failed to find rewards along the way.

The Transient Repertoire

I've forgotten where exactly, but somewhere or other among all the blogtastic drivel I've consumed over the past couple of weeks was an archetypal lament of the lack of recent compositions by living jazz artists which have truly entered the repertoire. It is indeed unfortunate in a sense, and yet at the same time, one wonders if this is simply a paradox inherent in the jazz tradition itself. Jazz is creative music, and as such, most everyone who plays it also composes for themselves (and rarely, if ever, for others; that's another interesting discussion). Performer-Composer is much more than a "traditional" mold towards which most musicians gravitate; it is essentially demanded of you by all kinds of circumstances inherent to this tradition. The inhibition of repertory momentum is built-in, paradoxically, by this emphasis on multi-faceted creativity.

You could say that there certainly is still a repertoire, and that it certainly has begun to ossify, but I can't help but wonder if this isn't the most incisive way to look at it. For one thing, the basic unit of currency in jazz repertoire has always been the particular performance, not just the lead sheet: Coltrane's and Hawkins' performances of "Body and Soul" are, of course, discrete items for today's players and listeners to tackle. In addition, within the most traditional circles, one could argue that the highly derivative nature of the compositions simply represents a different slant on repertoire, one by which the unit of currency is, again, a smaller one than the lead sheet: in other words, licks, chord progressions, and song forms. Perhaps this work doesn't so much enter the repertoire because it is the repertoire ground up and reconstituted with less new material added than might be expected in, say, the classical compositional tradition. By this logic, neo-traditionalism can be understood as a necessary "sausage-making" process that each generation (perhaps each musician) is tasked with, and as long as the "innovation" is happening concurrently somewhere else, this in and of itself cannot be a bad thing.

Having said all of that, I hereby nominate Buster Williams' "Christina" and Dave Holland's "The Balance" for repertory status. Damn it would be nice to be able to call either of those at a session...

With six trumpets three tubas, you can do anything

Tonight, 8pm in the Wild Beast at CalArts.

The "S" Series: S-1

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

Coltrane's Exercises and Excesses

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

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

The Problem with John Coltrane~~Part 2: Technique

Unlearning the Learned and Thoughts on Exercises...

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

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

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

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

The "Problem with John Coltrane" to which Savage obliquely refers here is that Coltrane was both an eminent technician and a potent and eloquent creative artist, and that these two characteristics are inextricable in his music. He always seemed to have something to say, no matter the technique involved, and this is indeed a singular and exceptional facet of his work which the rest of us only hope we might someday achieve. Yet it is also undeniable that even his prodigious technique wasn't always adequate to realize what he had to say. For me as a player and teacher this is the more constructive, salient point and a facet of his music that is equally central, distinguishable, and powerful. It is not that Savage evinces ignorance of this; rather, he seems neurotically overburdened by it, implying that because us mere mortals will never achieve Coltrane's degree of creative potency we would be better served cutting our technical development off at the knees before the two get out of balance with each other.

I think that to demonize technique in this way because of something John Coltrane did is to sell both him and ourselves way too short. I also think it is clearer yet that to demonize it because of something his shameless imitators did is to give them way too much credit. It is a terrible waste of time to complain that subsequent generations of musicians have exhibited only those aspects of Coltrane's mastery which can be taught while remaining deficient in those which can't. This outcome is indeed frustrating, but it is also wholly predictable. It is bad enough to worry excessively about that which one cannot control, and it is worse yet to be overtaken by this anxiety and jump to the conclusion that technical and creative sophistication are essentially anathema to each other; that is, that "more often than not this preoccupation [with technique] comes at the expense of good music." The latter sentiment is one of colloquial discourse's most enduring and destructive gestures against human creativity, a complaint which is as old as time, and one which is one-hundred and ten percent false on account of a textbook conflation of correlation and causation.

Such observers as Mr. Savage are in this sense themselves "blinded by technique" more so even than the objects of their ire: they fail to see that there is no latent creative potency trapped inside all those soulless technicians, nothing their technique is inhibiting them from saying with their music. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is simply a soulless technician with nothing to say. To issue broad condemnations of technical sophistication on such grounds is to let the technique terrorists win, so to speak. As long as we don't let them, they can't; so don't, and they won't. It is that simple.

It is more easily argued that there are only so many hours in the day and hence that allocating all of them to technical development and little or none to pursuing other aspects of musicianship will cripple the musician. That is very different, though, from arguing that technical development inherently retards the development of these other facets, even when a concurrent effort is made. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that this is the case; what is more clear, to me at least, is that technique is simply apt to blossom in many players long before a commensurate musico-intellectual maturity can been reached, and that social, environmental, and developmental factors alike undoubtedly have roles to play here. A perfectly concurrent development among all aspects of musicianship is an attractive ideal for many reasons, but ultimately it is neither plausible nor particularly necessary.

But what, then, of those who, whether by dint of nature or nurture, never even out, who continue playing boring, derivative, technically astute jazz into their 30's, 40's, 50's, and 60's? Savage wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

For someone so troubled by dry technical displays, Savage here reveals a peculiar blindness to one of their overarching causes: it is precisely when exercises are not taken seriously as artworks that they are reduced to this level. There is little pedagogical dispute that the ideal way to practice even the driest of materials, such as scales and arpeggios, is expressively**, meaning making intentional use of a variety of dynamics, articulations, tones, meters and tempos. Giant Steps no less than any other lead-sheet-style composition can be performed mechanically or it can be performed expressively; the challenge of making music over a formulaic structure can be accepted, met, constructively subverted, and so on, or it can simply be evaded. Savage himself notes the repetitive nature of Coltrane's own Giant Steps solo; are we to simply "approach" the changes this way for all time, hiding behind the supposition that Coltrane didn't take his own composition seriously enough to bother making music with it? This is absurd. We not only should take every interpretive challenge seriously, we must. The consequence of an irreverent "approach" to musical material is precisely the consequence Savage (and I) would prefer to avoid.

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

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

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

[Update 4/7/16: Commenter Dan, whose musicianship and earnestness I can vouch for based on offline encounters, quickly chimed in to relate a different experience of our hometown. Of course there are sessions in the Twin Cities, but not like there are in Los Angeles, where the adult hobbyists at the monthly Blue Whale jam would shred 90% of the "pros" back home. I meant my original comment about the Twin Cities only in the sense that the Germans once succeeded in saddling England with the label Das Land ohne Musik. Even today, as an alumnus of Jazz Ahead, of Joe LaBarbera's and Darek Oles' combos at CalArts, and of too many high-powered original groups to list, I am mildly intimidated by the Whale sessions. They are that good. Conversely, after Brilliant Corners closed (i.e. over decade ago, when I was barely old enough to drink), I never found another regular session in Minnesota that was on my level. As for the few I did attend subsequently out of hubris or self-torture, I was being honest about what I heard, or didn't.]

Second, I play tuba, not saxophone. Giant Steps is not a fait accompli for my instrument, it hasn't exactly been overplayed by tubists, and I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to hack through it from time to time that a self-respecting saxophonist probably shouldn't. The DJA post I linked to above includes the following outburst, which points to the crux of the matter:

in case you hadn't realized (because you were too busy practicing) -- lots of people can and do play the shit out of this stuff. I don't care if you are even more flawless and even more polished than the currently reigning heavyweight champion of polished flawlessness, this stuff is just not impressive anymore. Even if your sole objective as a musician is to blow us away with your l33t skillz, the only way you can actually accomplish that is by doing something we haven't heard done a million times before.

On a different day with the wind blowing in a different direction, I could have written that myself. However, it is far less true of my instrument's (non-)tradition any day of the week than it is of DJA's, and I think this largely accounts for our difference in perspective. I don't know that changing the instrumentation of a warhorse and leaving everything else intact should count as "something we haven't heard done a million times before," but if I seem to be implying that it should, this is part of the reason. Certainly I have hardly ever heard myself succeed at playing Giant Steps, and this provides motivation to return to it periodically. Playing melodic eighth note lines clearly at any tempo above quarter=250 is still a real challenge for me, regardless of the changes, and frankly, I'd agree that the Giant Steps changes themselves are not among the most difficult. (Much more difficult to learn from a changes standpoint, even at its more moderate tempo, was a tune like 26-2, where the sequence is occasionally fudged.) I wouldn't bother, though, if I didn't like the tune, nor would I bother with blues, Rhythm, or Impressions changes if I didn't also find each of those structures to offer something vital and pleasurable. Is the 12-bar blues merely "overplayed," or has it rather "stood the test of time?"

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

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


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


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

Blogging The Spare Parts

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

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



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

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

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

Second Loves (iii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make-Up Calls

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

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

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

Revision as Conformity

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

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

After Gann

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

Addition By Subtraction

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

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

Me, Myself, and The Music I Want To Hear

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

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

(click here to read the entire post)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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