First Reflections Occasioned By the Long-Awaited Digital Matriculation of the ECM Catalog

(1) A lot of new stuff suddenly sounds a lot less new.

(2) It is a unique pleasure (not to say an essential one) to encounter severely "dated" music which nonetheless remains compelling.

(3) Only now is it obvious to me that my musically formative years (the late 1990s and early 2000s) had a unique and identifiable sound (the playing, the writing, and yes kids, even the production) which has undoubtedly left its mark. Even ECM's distinctive and consistent house production leaves room for this impression.

Exchange with Milo Fine (iii): "a smattering of constants"

[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii)]

[SK] The delivery of a consistent product does seem to be a non-negotiable demand of "careerism," no matter the stated (or unstated) stylistic orientation of the artist.

[MF] Keeping in mind, of course, that a hype-driven image, leaning, naturally, towards the faux provocative, is more important than the consistency of the product.

Even a panoply of pop music styles doesn't fly; like a restaurant chef, unpredictability gets you canned.

Well, that sort of thing *is* possible. There are any number of pop musicians who have "reinvented" themselves successfully.

For all the tiresome rehashing of inherent conflicts between artistry and the marketplace, I wonder if this one actually shouldn't be talked about more than it is?

Absolutely. But that might get us to something like a truth, and so, is willfully avoided.

We are, collectively, so not yet beyond style, no matter what people say in their bios.

Generally, yes. But, on the other hand, there is a growing pervasiveness in the blurring of style; a sort of New World Arts Order; an attempt to bring everyone together under a specious pastiche-stained umbrella. Obviously, this is not being beyond style.

When I was younger, I myself became quite frustrated with any number of current jazz players I had heard once in some particular context I enjoyed, only to find it was all they'd ever done in that vein. The opposite, though, can also be galling: personally, I think the world of Brad Mehldau as a player, but I hear almost no evolution across his body of work. In my mind, the inner circle will always be reserved for the Ligetis and Coltranes, i.e. those whose quality control is impeccable throughout substantial artistic evolutions.

This is something for which I also have the utmost respect, though, on the other hand, the production of even one small body of work, or a single piece with resonance is admirable. Not everyone has the wherewithal to sustain the spirit, though, goddamn-it, more could at least make the effort!

There is a book by economist David Galenson, which I recommend, called Old Masters and Young Geniuses which makes something of an empirical study of these two types of artists across several disciplines, drawing some compelling conclusions. (Equally interesting: he neglects to take on music directly.)

I'll make a note of that, though the stack is pretty thick and time is running out.

Your reticence regarding fixed lists of favorites is, though it foils a potentially juicy piece of bloggerel, timely in and of itself.

Well, as I said in an interview with Pamela (Espeland) some years ago, in those cases, 'Either you talk about all the people that everybody talks about, the pantheon; or, you start bringing up all the arcane people, showing how hip you are.' To be clear, there are people who's oeuvre is impressively consistent. If you keep pressing, I *might* go there.

[Milo adds later: Another issue in my reluctance has to do with the fact that there are any number of people doing significant work who have little or no public presence; people of whom I am, naturally, unaware. Thus, my disinclination to make a public list is, in part, a gesture of respect to bodies of work relegated, by choice and/or design, to the shadows.]

There is a lot of talk right now, and there has been for some time, of purging essentialist notions of transcendence/timelessness from our musical culture.

An excuse for mediocrity; especially if there's *just* enough faux transcendence/timelessness to get it over with its target audience.

My personal take (subject, I suppose, to the same vicissitudes as musical taste itself) is that the more ardent proponents of this deconstruction have gone a bit overboard. (I mean, getting back to co-optation for a second, have pop songwriters and middlebrow film composers not mined the Well-Tempered Clavier at least as thoroughly as navel-gazing academics have?)

More troublesome is the fact that this shit satiates the appetite of the "masses" in general, and, in too many cases, the so-called arts consumer as well.

Certainly it figures that any given artwork needs some...good luck? on its side, no matter its internal qualities, to still be receiving any attention whatsoever centuries after its creation. I'm fine with maintaining a healthy suspicion toward the motivations/ideologies which enable this.

The old cliche about being in the right place at the right time certainly holds true. And your suspicions are certainly well-founded. The nature of history is suspect; who is reported on and why. I've remarked elsewhere on the fact that in order for a person to be credited and acknowledged, they have to have a degree of cultural/social visibility. Plus, no *one* person invents anything; it's always a matter of the collective unconscious and the manifestation of an idea via particular electrical/chemical conduits (i.e.; humans).

But, let's face it, at some point there will be no "humanity". So the notion that something is still revered after centuries is ultimately a moot point.

It's also healthy (necessary?) to acknowledge our own fickleness by...I don't know, how we name our blogs? Nothing is absolute here. You, however, are older and more experienced than I am, and I simply wondered if by this time you might have noted a smattering of constants among your (stunning) record collection? Actually, I know you have in *other* areas; but what you say about commercial music is so obviously true.

But, to be my own devil's advocate -- a role I often play -- concerning pop music, I can accede to the fact that a percentage of musicians working in commercial fields have a certain earnestness; at least for a time. But, overall, any distinction/creative impulse is quickly lost due to the nature of the activity; a sort of inherent gravitation to a lowest common denominator; a sinkhole effect that one also finds in jazz, classical music, and, yes, improvised music as well; particularly when other sensibilities are embraced in order to gain acceptance. (See previous Musil quote.)

"A smattering of constants" among my record collection is an extremely apt description. I have been let down by so many artists who, over time, have not maintained that creative fire that initially drew me to them. But, I do so love being surprised when some inconsistent cat releases something of note. The fact that someone can still rise to the occasion is admirable.

For me, at least, it's equally true of very "accessible" jazz and classical music: I own exactly one Keith Jarrett Standards Trio record, which I at first thought could never be enough, but quickly became convinced is probably just the right number.

One too many, I'd say.

Conversely, one of my very favorite records (or music of any kind) is the album Miles Smiles. I'm comfortable extrapolating from my first dozen or so years spent with that record that it is, for me, "timeless," and not just because it seems to appeal to me in virtually any mood, environment, or other harbinger of fickleness, but because I notice something new every time I listen. Such a cliche, I know, but for me there's no other record I've had quite the ongoing journey of newfound realizations about as with this one. Surely you have a few of those, no? (You don't have to name them.)

Easier to pinpoint when I was young(er) and had fewer records! With the sheer volume comes a sort of diffusion. And, to be honest, with so much stuff being available (and so much of it being sub-par), combined with my having a fairly extensive library, plus auditing my own ongoing work, I simply don't seek out material the way I used to. That said, there are certainly works that are near and dear to me; evoking a sense memory of where I was at when I first heard them and the inspiration they provided concerning finding my own voice. (Ironically this phenomena is similar to what the so-called average consumer calls "the soundtrack of my life" vis a vis pop songs.)

Finally, if I'm not being too dense in asking, I'd love for you to expand upon your use of the term "resonance" throughout the last dispatch, particularly regarding that of "work" versus that of "daily life." I can think of a few specific aspects you might be getting at, and I suspect you mean to get at all of them, but I'm not totally sure. Certainly I too have known people to say and do completely different things, to claim a music or artist or era is "so totally important" to them, but to concurrently admit that they more or less abandoned it when they graduated music school. (It's usually something "out," for which something "in" has been swapped; coincidence, then, that this happens for so many people upon entry into the so-called "real world?") If you mean to draw a more direct (i.e. allegorical) connection between art and life here, I'd benefit from some fleshing out of that notion. Something tells me your use of the term is not simply decorative.

Of course you're not being dense! I use the word "resonance", but one could substitute "transcendence", or even "depth". The problem, of course, is that words have, for a long time, been thoroughly misappropriated and thus, used up. But, words are all we've got, so we keep pissing into the wind. While subjectivity always plays a (too often unfortunate) part, I think -- and please pardon my willful naivety and idealism -- if people were to experience music, painting, sculpture, etc. in an open, less conditioned manner, there would be a sort of consensus as to what constitutes a work with "resonance". In any case, resonance is, to me, readily apparent, and is something to be striven for. (Aside: over the years, as I've gotten to know younger people, I make recommendations as to what to check out and what to avoid. Inevitably, people will challenge my choices, and, almost without exception, they find out that my sensibilities are uncannily spot-on. But this "ability" is really nothing special; more a matter of discernment; of perceiving with resonance.) And, if one can touch that in one's work, can it not be striven for and applied in one's life? The done-to-death tortured (and/or crazy) asshole artist stereotype is still an extremely viable marketing ploy. And, as with most stereotypes, there is truth to it. But, it is ultimately tiresome; as is the newer image of artist-businessperson. For example, by all accounts, John Coltrane was nearly a saint, in the best sense of the term; what he learned from sound he brought to his life, and vice versa. This is what I'm getting at. As for what you describe in people abandoning something important to them, this is simply a succumbing of sorts. At some point, they touch something "resonant", but as personal/societal/cultural pressures come to bear they sadly, if predictably acquiesce to the sickness of status quo. Easier to abandon than to struggle at that level.

In Plain Sight

This surely will be used against me in any future discussion of the social function(s) of music, but I have to admit that it sure has been lovely to be able to attend musical performances anonymously for the first time since I was a teenager. And now that I read books, I can even bring one with me, which has enabled the reclamation of all that built-in concert downtime for dribs and drabs of pseudo-scholarly endeavor. It beats the pants off making small talk, or at least I would think so. I do have to admit some trepidation about walking in with pretentious-looking reading material, as if I am there merely to conspicuously consume it in the presence of other aesthetes while simultaneously erecting a barrier of hipsterism by sitting locked in concentration with so much petty socializing happening around me. There was a long stretch of my life where the mere thought of coming off that way scared me out of things as innocuous as carrying a book around. Perhaps that's because I'm among the quickest to jump to that conclusion about others. For the moment, though, I've found the space and am enjoying it. See you there, and catch you some other time.

Secretary of Outreach

George Colligan relates a familiar story, drawn in this case from his early years on the East Coast scene:

What often ends up happening is that whomever can convince every friend they had from middle school on and every extended family member to come out every time they play will be the successful ones. If you spend all of your time shedding, and have a small circle of friends and family who also have a life of their own, you can't expect them to come out every time you play! (I used to do OK at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. when my Dad or Mom would really organize folks to come to my performances. But I did a lot of gigs with local singers who were secretaries by day; they would invite the entire office to their gig once a year and they would pack the place. So this was the beginning of what I thought was an imbalance. The really good local musicians who played on the scene regularly couldn't draw a crowd at Blues Alley; but the amateur folks could do really well with ticket sales.

Indeed, it has always astounded me just how well "amateurs" tend to do with ticket sales and the like, and this dynamic is clearly at the heart of it. However, the dark matter here, that which lurks beneath the observable dynamics and outcomes while dwarfing them in severity, deserves to be articulated too: could it be any clearer that listeners can't tell (or don't care to) the difference between professional and amateur productions, whether they are personally acquainted with the band or not?

Brad Mehldau and the Naive Audience

I imagine I'm not alone in having substantially modified my listening activities in recent years to take full advantage of the advent of digital music streaming. I now spend long stretches investigating particular artists or other themes, listening once to everything I can find, taking note of the things I'd like to hear again and returning later to spend quality time with them. At that point, I do in fact purchase my own copies, digitally or otherwise, rather than streaming; the internet still doesn't work everywhere all the time, and who knows if it will ever be allowed to.

"You know that record, right?" Yes and no. I probably listened to that record once and forgot all but the name of it, unless it was killing, but even then, it's probably still dangling in the purgatory of Listmania, waiting its turn to either change my life or frustrate the hell out of me. As many elders have pronounced, the danger of failing to truly absorb anything you've heard is now ever-present for students of music. I would take the present situation a hundred times out of a hundred, though, in exchange for almost never having to plop down $5, $10, $20 worrying that it might not be worth it in any number of ways that records, good or bad, relevant or otherwise, often are not. Thankfully, you no longer have to buy the chair having only been shown the legs; now you actually get to sit down in it and scratch yourself.

Truthfully, I can't in good conscience recommend single audition investigation to younger students or any other new listeners. For years, I had to hear something at least 3 times to begin to form an opinion; I didn't just observe this after the fact, but actually felt it in the moment. My formative years would have been quite a bit less formative had I indulged first impressions the way I do nowadays. It makes sense to me, though, that with experience comes acuity, and indeed, my evaluation is now far less likely to change from the first audition to the second, and almost never from the second to the third. Perhaps this also suggests that the well-documented inflexibility of age is beginning to set in; then again, don't these digital treasure troves of damn-near-everything offer by their very scatterbrained nature a particularly powerful antidote to just that affliction? Without the internet, Gentle Giant, Univers Zero and Lightnin' Hopkins would likely have remained mysteries to me until it was truly too late. It used to cost too much to take shots in the dark on stuff you weren't sure about; were we really better off that way?

I've now gone down the Spotify rabbit hole, but plan to keep my eMusic subscription as well, and so for just a bit more than the cost of a new CD, I get a month of unlimited investigation and future offline access to the cream of that crop. As a professional skeptic, I am so optimistic about all of this that it scares me just a bit. I understand that those afflicted with the scourge of audiophilia are not so optimistic, nor are those who aspire to someday raise 2.5 kids solely on their record sales. For me, however, there's no ethical or practical reason not to jump in with two feet. The "promise of technology" is so often just a capitalist ruse, but for musicians, I think this much of it is real. We had better make good on it, don't you think?

•••••
One of my first lines of inquiry a few years ago was Brad Mehldau. I have never been one to keep up with the latest developments in music, often feeling too bogged down with catching up on what happened before I was born, but the new digital music paradigm has been a great excuse for me to begin to remedy that, especially since artists active today tend to be represented fairly completely in the digital realm, unlike those who released lots of records before such technology became widespread. For his part, Mehldau has been prolific: my survey took weeks to complete, but it painted a vivid picture as a result. After a couple of years, I have just recently returned to the record that came out at the top of the heap based on those single hearings: The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4: Back at the Vanguard from 1999 with Larry Grenadier (bass) and Jorge Rossy (drums).

Repeated listening has clinched landmark status for this record in my mind for many reasons. Mehldau's playing is original and distinctive, identifiable from the first note, and nonetheless drenched in tradition. The live energy on this recording is positively crackling, the band playing exceptionally well as a unit with all three musicians producing incredible sounds on their instruments. The originals are fresh, the standard material is reinvigorated, and the repertoire is enhanced. I'm purposely repeating every jazz cliche I can think of, and I think they all apply here. Stated in such vague terms, however, they apply to many great jazz recordings, not just this one, which is why we are all sick and tired of reading them over and over and feeling as if we have not really learned anything about the material we are researching. Further, detractors will grant a record every one of these points, even the energy part, and remain unmoved aesthetically. That should tell us something.

I am, as I hope I have made clear, hardly a detractor in this case, nor am I, to be sure, suddenly aspiring to critic-hood, but as the greatness of this record began to sink in, some unique explanations presented themselves which I think go beyond the standard critical tropes namechecked above in a much-needed way. Specifically, I think that the dialogue surrounding audience development for jazz and other art musics is a potentially fascinating lens through which to consider the content of this particular record. Such is my primary purpose here.

As a trained musician with loads of technical knowledge and focused listening experience, this music presented me from the opening piano intro a decisive choice between two distinct modes of listening, and it turns out not to be the structural option that affords me a degree of enjoyment and fulfillment commensurate with a "landmark" jazz record, but rather something more moment-to-moment, akin to what is typically ascribed to the hypothetical naive listener. Why is this? On one hand, it is just plain difficult to hear this music structurally because the style of playing makes the songforms really hard to follow. There is, however, a crucial redeeming quality here, namely that these techniques consistently serve the creation of attractive musical surfaces.

Music like this can actually be a more disconcerting experience for the structurally inclined specialist the more familiar the material is, since there is then a proportionally higher degree of expectation to be violated or neglected. The degree of spontaneous displacement, reharmonization, and riffing that takes place, often at breakneck tempos, is severe, making following along a full-time job, even for large stretches of the warhorse standards "All The Things You Are" and "Solar." On the other hand, I still don't know the form to Mehldau's composition "Sehnsucht" and I don't particularly care to; I would have to listen structurally, and in the case of this record, that is usually not as much fun. The specialist is uniquely equipped to make this kind of decision by reading such performances for technical cues as to how they might best be heard. It is hardly in my nature to do this quite so consciously, but as I say, this record seems to demand a firm decision from the get-go in a way I've scarcely experienced before. What, then, about the hypothetical jazz naif around whom the audience development discussion necessarily revolves? Is he or she not by default the ultimate surface-oriented listener? Does he or she get to make a decision?

•••••
The critical dialogue in jazz can, in my opinion, be thrown for quite a loop by the style of playing on this record, which has many contemporary exponents besides Mehldau, and which I would venture does indeed have the potential to polarize reception between initiates and non-initiates to a greater degree than many other jazz styles. Of course, the critical reception of this particular record was scarcely less than glowing; part of my goal here is to unpack why that is and what it means. But I need to clarify what I mean, then, when I claim that this kind of playing is frequently misunderstood.

It is fair to say that the kind of escalated structural deception and rarefied technique on display here is often met with knee-jerk accusations of over-intellectualization and technical overdevelopment. Musicians themselves have many reasons besides taste for leveling such criticisms, but in the case of non-musician critics, I wonder if it is not more significant that such music subverts a dearly held value of the jazz music they know best, namely clarity of structural articulation. I certainly am not writing to plant seeds of ambivalence about structural articulation, to which I once devoted its own outreach-oriented screed. Rather, I want to make the case for understanding The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4 as songform-based jazz where structural articulation is, shockingly, more or less incidental to the listening experience, and which is therefore a prime candidate to connect with listeners whose structural awareness is less than that of the average professional jazz musician.

The most basic lesson here about bugaboos like structural displacement and expansive instrumental technique is that when it all works, no one complains. It sure would be nice to see more analysis from critics as well as musicians that makes constructive suggestions as to how technique might be put to better use in the music under discussion rather than simply declaring how dearly they wish the players' chops had been purposefully stunted. As a model combination of chops and sensitivity, Mehldau should have an important place in such discourse, and those of us who play would do well to learn what we can from him in this way. More germane to the topic at hand, though, I am concerned that musicians and non-musicians only think they are speaking the same language if and when matters of structural articulation and displacement come up for discussion. Most anyone who has not played the music at a high level, whether a professional critic or just an anonymous listener, is reduced to face-value acceptance of futile attempts by musicians to verbalize what they do. Leading questions like "How do you know where you are?" or "How do you all stay together?" are, tellingly, the same questions that young students ask when they lack the grounding and bandwidth to "just play" tunes without getting lost, just all of us once did, possibly for a longer stretch of our lives than we would want to admit to the rare critic who has taken an interest in us.

The teacher, if he is not careful, can sow the same confusion in these students that he sows in critics who ask him these things after a gig if he breaks down and says something like, "You just always have to know where you are in the form of the song," and leaves it at that. As an answer, that is literally 100% true, but it is also highly misleading. The truly inquisitive will follow up with the inevitable, "But you're not really thinking about measures/scales/chords/keys/fingerings, right?" "Right," you say, and send them off more confused than they were before. Or, you just keep digging yourself a deeper semantic hole until you've stopped making sense and they decide to leave you alone.

The ineffability of music is not a new topic of discussion, so forgive me for belaboring the point a bit. The reason I do so here is to highlight the fallacy in reasoning such as this:

Jazz musicians love jazz the most.

Jazz musicians always know where they are in the songform.

Therefore, love of jazz varies directly with the ability to know where you are in the songform.

Jazz songform, unfortunately, is a nuanced, dialectical concept that defies a simple explanation. The diligent student of jazz appreciation following along with "All The Things You Are" is not doing the same thing as the high-level jazz musician "always knowing where they are in the form" throughout a heated performance. In the syllogism above, the musician and the non-musician are, as usual, talking at cross purposes. If we therefore reject equating knowledge gained through high-level participation with that gained from a distance through scholarship but accept the thesis that love of jazz varies proportionately with structural fluency, we thereby resign ourselves to the notion that jazz can only be truly appreciated by people who play it at a high level, since that is the only way to obtain a central skill required to appreciate it. For the reasons I have given, I indeed believe that we equate those two types of knowledge at our own peril, but I also believe that according such centrality to structural concerns is a mistake, and therefore that this conclusion, thankfully, is incorrect.

Consider, if you were not already aware, that there are circles of jazz musicians working today, peers of Mehldau's in age if not always in stature, who take structural obfuscation and displacement on standard material to absurd lengths, far beyond what takes place on this record. As a nominal fellow professional, I will refrain from naming names, but I don't doubt some readers will know just who I'm thinking of, and if they have people in mind I've never heard of, better yet. I have alternately tried listening to this music in each of the two modes I referenced at the outset, that is structurally and non-structurally. I found neither appealing. Displacement does not always create an attractive surface, and it also makes the alternative of structural listening difficult and unpleasant. I have had a foot in gnarlier music than this my whole adult life and this music appeals to neither my head nor my heart. I am secure in dismissing it.

Mehldau has never been so easily dismissible on these grounds, and for better or worse doesn't seem likely to put himself in danger of it from hereon out. This may actually be one of his least accessible records, one which, even if it goes down as his best, as I think it could, will never be recommended as a starting point for students investigating his work for the first time. Even so, accessibility has always been one of Mehldau's defining qualities, and without getting on too sharp a razor's edge about what the word itself might mean, I would posit that no one has ever made more accessible jazz music with such a healthy disregard for traditional structural articulation, and yet without ever begging the question of why form was not abandoned from the outset. Donning my critic's hat for just a moment, I contend that this is a staggering achievement that deserves to be part of this music's enduring legacy. That is to say that if this record is remembered first and foremost for "deconstructing" or "messing with" standard songforms because the non-musician critics drank the structural listening kool-aid and the musicians had their fingers too far up their noses to be able to break the rest of this down for them, I will turn in my grave. (I'll double-time it if it is remembered first and foremost for covering Radiohead, though after checking out some other versions of "Exit Music," including the original, I can't say I'm not impressed with how much Mehldau manages to squeeze out of it.)

Songforms shape the surface qualities of this music profoundly, but they do so from an immeasurably greater distance than textbook jazz appreciation is accustomed to dealing with, and that is to say that the clarity or obfuscation of the underlying songform is irrelevant when the work's defining feature is its surface. This music demands to be heard moment-to-moment and in that sense is made for the naive listener as well as for the specialist. That is not to say by any means that any particular naive listener is guaranteed to like what they hear on that surface (witness this lonely and inadvertently hysterical Amazon review), but it is right there for them to judge, served up with a loving transparency that would make Kyle Gann blush. We do violence to the voices of naive jazz listeners and to the larger dialogue about audience development in jazz, if we indeed want to have one, by insisting on a structural hearing where none is necessary. Similarly, sending grant-funded troupes of mediocre local heroes and underdeveloped college jazz majors out to perform in acoustically disastrous spaces isn't going to win jazz very many new fans, but presenting music like this could. First, though, we must give some thought to how to spot it among the mayhem of the burgeoning digital archive.

•••••
I am tempted in spite of my formalist tendencies to argue that the defining feature of every work of music is its surface, but you don't have to be willing to go that far to be led to question the need for listeners to hang on every structural landmark. I have to think Mehldau would agree: in his notes to Sam Yahel's album Truth and Beauty, remarking on the band's ability to "[make] an unconventional meter sound natural and fluid," he adds that "It only becomes tricky when you try to count it!" And now we are back to cliches about jazz, but this one, I insist, is crucially important, for only in taking just such a step back from The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4 is the true depth of Mehldau's contribution revealed.

It is true that "surface" and "depth" are concepts which often cohabit plenty of slippery ground, but I am nonetheless content that this language helps immensely in communicating the essence of how I hear this music and how I suspect it is most readily underappreciated, if only relatively so. Such it is that exalting the "surface" could be taken to imply the charge of superficiality. I would not go quite that far. I have already called this record a "landmark," which I stand by, but hand to heart, I cannot bring myself to see it in the very top echelon for precisely this reason. It is unusually intricate surface-oriented music achieved by means of frighteningly intricate but inessential deeper structures. It is not music where I notice something shockingly new every time I listen, one of those faux-intellectual litmus tests of musical profundity, but one which throughout my journey I've only become more perversely inclined to accept. And of course, returning to questions of methods, it now occurs to me to ask whether this is not precisely the kind of music that the listen-bookmark-return method is destined to privilege over every other kind. It's hard to imagine this dynamic doesn't exist at all; only time will tell, I suppose, if it proves a hinderance.

It must be borne in mind that surfaces are not by definition "accessible" in the abstract, though we might say that they are by definition more accessible than whatever it is that constitutes the corresponding depth. Bach's most densely populated fugues, for example, could legitimately be said to present a simpler underlying structure but far more daunting surface than Ligeti's Lontano. Dealing in thousands upon thousands of tiny grains of time and pitch right at the threshold of perceptual recognition allows Ligeti to construct larger units with shockingly simple-sounding, blurred surfaces; Bach's voices are, meanwhile, coarser grains with fiercer independence, thus running up against a wholly different set of perceptual limitations.

I was, in fact, reminded of both of these composers during the imitative passage between the left and right hands in "Solar." (I trust that those who "know" the record will follow my references and those who don't probably won't want to be bothered with listening to it right this second. And if they do want to be bothered with it, they should listen to the whole thing!) The contrapuntal technique here is somewhere between Bach and Ligeti, not exactly a true blur but nonetheless similarly disorienting in the context of a swingin' jazz piano solo, and yet lent ample clarity by the space between the voices and Mehldau's stunning independence. Does this snippet make this a "great" solo? Like most of them on this record, it is a solo that takes a moment to get going and doesn't always seem to develop in an ideally straight line. And yet there are extraordinary moments that leave you breathless, moments which wouldn't be nearly so powerful if they were more numerous and happened in the "right" order. I'm not sure the power of a more terse, sculpted solo could rival this one's cumulative impact.

Two other breathless spots in "Solar," once it gets cracking: the F blues romp that emerges out of the contrapuntal section referenced above, and shortly thereafter, the snatch of unison that materializes between the two hands in middle of a driving bebop line. (Sure, I'm being lazy about references again, but if you "know" the record and can't recall these, do you "know" the record? And if you don't "know" the record and have read this far anyway, are you really going to cue it up just for me and my stupid blog?) Mehldau's writing reveals a near-obsession with issues of irony and sincerity, and it is a credit to him that all three of these gestures are deathly serious, not to mention utterly shocking (in the best way) the first time you hear them. A credit due, this time, to the listen-bookmark-return method in that given enough intervening time you get to hear these moments for the first time twice.

It stands to reason that just how shocking they remain to new listeners of the future will directly impact the long-term critical standing of this music. Beethoven specialists eventually started sounding like idiots to just about everyone else when they continued building their interpretations on the supposed shock value of starting a piece on a secondary dominant or introducing a non-functional flatted seventh over the tonic triad. There are better explanations for that music's staying power. In the postmodern era, even such purely contextual shock is in danger of ceasing to be possible, but from my necessarily limited vantage point, it is a defining feature of this record nonetheless, which is precisely why the record, as great as I think it is, doesn't grow on me the way other music that is otherwise equally great often does.

That is to say that with each hearing the shocking parts lose their luster a bit. You cannot hear them the way they demand to be heard if you know they are coming. The first note of the out head on "All The Things," stated with a directness, metrically and otherwise, that hasn't yet been heard at this late stage of the tune, is stunning the first time and too obvious after that. The suspended alternating-hands figure in the piano that is high point of the "London Blues" solo (you know, where the knucklehead in the crowd starts shouting) is so exciting that at first you don't even notice that the last chorus of it starts with a comically plain C7 sound. Once you start to hear through the odd voicing, this becomes a disappointing resolution to one of the swingingest passages on the record. And the angular non-sequitur lick in "Nice Pass" only truly works as intended (that is, I have to think, unironically) when it is unfamiliar enough as to seem that the band really did collectively decide to stop on a dime in the 29th bar of Rhythm Changes and go all Cecil Taylor on it. Additional hearings of this epic performance inevitably confirm that the selfsame lick ends the tune, which colors its first appearance tremendously and outs all of this as the one ironic lapse on the record. (And really, wouldn't it just happen to be at the expense of the avant-garde?)

If anyone reading this hasn't heard this music and is inspired to check it out, I fear that I've now ruined it for you once and for all. Similarly, if I could shout through a computer screen, I would shout at the people in charge of musical outreach programs of all types: STOP PREPARING YOUR AUDIENCE!!! The truly profound in music tends to endure quite a bit more sturdily in the face of such tampering but does not offer up its secrets quite so readily. Hence, that this is decidedly music-for-the-moment should not detract from its greatness, especially not in jazz, which of course has always been moment music of a sort. As great as I think this album is based on my initial reactions, and as important as that stance implies I am willing to take initial reactions to be, I find surprisingly little here that threatens to grow on me in that "timeless" way. By speaking so directly, though, it just might speak to the naif in ways the specialist wouldn't normally anticipate. It's likely that anyone serious enough about music to be evangelizing for it has been shaped disproportionately by music of great depth which may not be a reliable hook for newbs, but I would hope it is also clear that mediocrity isn't going to hook anyone either. What is needed for this purpose is great surface-oriented music that lives in the moment. I for one will be looking to this record as a model.

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.

Perfunctory Year-End Metafiltering

Befitting the time of year we presently find ourselves mired in, NPR's A Blog Supreme has come out with its Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2012. Notwithstanding my pessimism about the very tenability of such lists, which I maintain, I nonetheless feel compelled to peek through my fingers as I cover my face with my hands. I listened to most of the music and wasn't really horrified by any of it which I heard, definitely a win. (The Don Cherry cover was mildly horrifying aesthetically, but not, I suppose, wholly inconsistent with his own thinking.) If you're looking for an endorsement, I'm afraid that's as close as I can get: professional obligation and morbid curiosity

Why such morbidity, the cultural relativists in the room demand to know? Going back to school has cut somewhat into my internet trolling time, but the time I have been able to spend over the last year or so has more often than not turned up artifacts which I do find truly horrifying, so much so in some cases that it is not their categorization as jazz or the clear outpacing of talent by promotion but, in fact, their mere existence which I find most troubling. One reason among many, I suppose, that it would be easier to delve deeper into the work that already exists than to actively seek out new things; a recent conversation here at school reminds me, though, that there are still people in the world (musicians, in fact) who claim to have exhausted all the music they are aware of, new or old, and need to find more just to have something to listen to. That seems impossible to me, but perhaps that's because I've done more canvassing than studying to this point in my life, and thus the realm of canvassed music comes to seem inexhaustible even as I truly know very little about it. There's no excuse, really, for not knowing something about what's going on now, and also, I think, grave consequences of a few different varieties for becoming truly out of touch with the Zeitgeist, even if you consider yourself a dissident; but since there's just so much stuff, filters become necessary evils in the equation, and because I so deeply distrust herd mentality (we call it other, cheerier things now, like "social media"), I try to source from a wide variety of them, and blogging, say what you want, is often helpful in this regard. I promise my participation at least one month out of the year.

T.K.O. in Gamers vs. Audiophiles

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

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

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

A Listening Heresy

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

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

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

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

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

Album Only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscription

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

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

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

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

Compression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visualizers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold Lala

I can't even remember how it happened, but a few months ago, I stumbled on a digital music vendor called Lala. Since then, I've mentioned it to several colleagues, a few of whom had heard of it, none of whom had used it. Here, then, is my totally unpaid and relatively uninformed endorsement for the site.

The primary difference between Lala and every other digital music vendor and internet radio outlet I'm familiar with is that registered users can listen to complete tracks once before purchasing. I'll say that again: you get to listen to the whole entire track without paying anything. This is very much unlike iTunes, for example, where you get lame 30 second tidbits that are useless for taking shots in the dark, and preclude forming even the seed of an opinion. It is also unlike Pandora, where one cannot choose to listen to anything in particular, but rather is at the mercy of their supposedly mind-reading algorithms (albeit ones that I found made the service both useful and effective for my purposes, and at the unbeatable price of free). In many ways, it even trumps YouTube, which I regularly extoll to my students as perhaps the most powerful and important listening resource available to them these days, yet which exists as such only to the extent that users are able to fool, hide from, litigate against, or publicly humiliate intellectual property rights holders who otherwise might (justly or unjustly) want the content they control to be removed.

Apparently, everything that is available for "web listening" on Lala has been licensed, how I can't imagine, but I'm not going to worry about it unless it suddenly goes up in smoke, in which case I'll wish I'd paid better attention, and also that I was a lawyer. There is also much listed which has apparently not (yet) been licensed as such and hence is not available for the one-shot free listen, as well as much that is simply indexed with no actual files available to purchase or listen to at all. And of course, there's plenty of stuff people like me consider interesting that is totally absent, but this time around, that's a small complaint; this site already offers instant free access to a lifetime's worth of music.

Why would I take the time to write about this? First off, don't you think it's just about fucking time that the customer should be able to listen to complete tracks before purchasing? Isn't it totally fucking annoying that enabling this would verge on a revolutionary act? Even 1 or 2 minute long samples are totally worthless when trying to choose a recording of an epic classical symphony movement, or in evaluating a piece of free improvisation that fills an entire disc. It's like trying to buy a bike but only being allowed to see the handlebars. Conversely, if what Lala has accomplished catches on (and why woudn't it?), no future site will be able to compete without offering at least the same perusal privileges to its users, or maybe even without upping the ante. That's huge.

The bike/handlebar analogy is a relatively objective and airtight way of arguing for the absolute necessity of what the good people at Lala have accomplished for music and musicians, but don't think that I, in my own totally subjective and perversely pseudo-academic crusade against shallow listening, don't also just love the fact that, if not only in theory, this is a system which privileges deep, engaging, radical music that simply demands repeated auditions in order to be fully absorbed over saccharine ear candy that one might not feel absolutely necessitates a second hearing. In practice, of course, I doubt that this will bring about a true flipping of the scales where abstract modern classical composers become rich and famous on account of their brisk MP3 sales while hustling pop musicians are forced to cobble together a living from studio teaching and session work because everyone can hear their songs once for free and simply decide it's not necessary to hear them again if that privilege is going to carry an 89¢ price tag. Even so, know that I'll be faithfully doing my part to see that plan through. From now on, when professional obligation or peer pressure begets perfunctory curiosity about something I know I won't be able to stand hearing more than once anyway, I can scratch that itch without having to pay for it. Meanwhile, I can also investigate things I suspect may be of deeper interest to me, hear the entire works, purchase only those which simply demand to be purchased, and know that I'm not just throwing money down the drain. And of course, true shots in the dark can and will be taken. That's probably the most exciting part, and something that desperately needs to be encouraged and enabled among occupants of the teetotalling modern day pop-cultural mainstream. How about it y'all? I'll show you mine if you show me yours...

As you can see, I can hardly contain my optimism about this state of affairs, but the downside to all of this (if there is one) is that it has swiftly brought about the inevitable conclusion of an otherwise very slowly evolving process in my listening habits, and I've been left just a bit shell-shocked as a result. When I first got serious about music towards the end of high school, I also got incredibly methodical about listening, perhaps even a bit too much so. Part of that was attributable to economics: CD's cost between $5 and $15 each back then, and I was earning $7.50 an hour working just a couple shifts a week in a bagel shop. Hence, I had to get the most out of my purchases, and would seldom acquire new discs until I simply could not stand to listen to the old ones any longer. This was not, however, entirely a money issue. I also decided that it was more useful to me as a developing composer and improvisor to know a little bit of music really well rather than to simply listen superficially to as much unique work as I could get my hands on. And as all of this threatened to severely limit breadth, I seldom allowed myself to purchase more than one disc by the same artist. Put into terms I did not possess at that time, what I sought to do was to assemble collection of major works, each of which was more of less representative of its creator's overall work, and to get to know each of them inside and out.

While colleagues and teachers have gently taken me to task since on each of these counts, I wouldn't do anything differently if I had it to do over again. No amount of stylistic breadth was truly feasible in that timeframe that would have satisfied everyone around me, nor myself, but I made surprisingly good decisions for my age, as well as some curious ones the lasting impact of which I'm only now beginning to understand, but which I don't regret one bit, since if anything, they've made me more unique (and I can say with a straight face that it was on purpose). The fact that I dwelled forever on a disc before moving on to the next one sometimes made me feel uncool, since others my age began to significantly outpace me in terms of breadth, and yet the fact that I could hum my way through a dozen complete Eric Dolphy solos before I had so much as smelled the level of technical proficiency required to execute them on tuba allowed me to reach that level sooner than I would have otherwise, dare I say sooner also than many who spent more of their practice time listening to records than actually practicing.

As my collection grew and I became aware of more and more music, my listening patterns gradually started to shift. As I've written before, this is part of the reason my overall listening decreased quite markedly between about 2004 and 2007 (late in college and immediately after graduation): because there was now so much more to get to, I spent less time on everything, and because I spent less time on everything, I developed shallower relationships with that music, both emotionally and technically. I went through a withdrawal of sorts, having become addicted to the naive and single-minded excitement that accompanied my initial exposure to so many of my early purchases. This sort of intense attachment developed less and less from my newer acquisitions either because I chose them out of mere professional obligation, or because the overall thrill of listening records was lessened by the fact that it was no longer a new discovery, but rather an addiction of sorts that cost money and begot plenty of interpersonal conflict, just like real drugs do.

Long story longer, Lala has rousted me from these doldrums and thrown me headlong into shallower, "survey" listening that is intensely exciting simply because it's a new way of doing things, but also because I sense the opportunity to finally start balancing out those several years where I embraced depth over breadth. I now spend most all of my listening time on Lala investigating things I'm curious about for some reason or another, knowing from the start that I have only one chance to listen for free. Ultimately, I know from experience that without returning at some point to the kind of deeper, repeated listening that begets memorization and occasionally even obsession, my true "knowledge" of music will stagnate and my creative well will begin to run dry. However, as you could have guessed from the story I just told, there are some fairly significant holes not just in my pantheon of favorites, but indeed in my overall experience as well. Lala is giving me a chance to remedy that, a chance that I never anticipated having, or, in some ways, even wanting. However, now that something has restored the naive, child-like excitement of my earliest days of "serious" musicianship, I'm inclined to ride that wave of excitement, hopefully all the way to the kind of comprehensive bird's eye view of recorded music history that I haven't allowed myself to develop previously. That can't possibly be a bad thing.

There's a social networking component to Lala, which is equal parts annoying and seductive. You can officially "follow" other listeners Twitter-style, or just visit their home pages where their supposed listening habits are on display. Every album is categorized according to genre, and your home page generates a bar graph to represent your tendencies. The assumption that the total quantity of tracks heard from an arbitrarily assigned (and often flat out misapplied) genre equates directly to a preference for that genre is an unfortunate pop culture holdover; making the same assumption about repeated listening is a bit safer, but not safe enough. Everything on the Tzadik label is considered "Rock," including some recent Wadada Leo Smith records that belie that categorization just a bit. Meanwhile, Univers Zero is egregiously labeled "Pop," Elmo Hope "Classical," and Monk's records seem to move up the food chain from "Jazz" to "Rock" to "Pop" based on how well they've sold.

In light of all of this, and also fearing that my, ahem, purely investigative forays into much music I can't stand could possibly reflect badly on my reputation among like minded colleagues (yes, both of them), I've forgone linking my Facebook account with Lala, which is an option that would have saved me the trouble of registering with yet another site, but which ultimately was less attractive for its potential to blow my cover. Hence, in order to find out what I'm up to, you'll have to know where to look, and I'm not going to tell you, though I'll give you a hint and say that if you don't recognize both the pseudonym and the photo, then you really ought to hang out here more often. I'm disappointed to find that the listening history apparently begins to purge itself after a couple of months. That's the one feature of the home page that I found essential, not to mention intriguing from a "digital remains" standpoint; imagine 22nd century musicologists settling the issue of whether a dead composer knew this or that piece by an obscure contemporary only after convincing his widow to log them into his Lala account. Of course, in enforcement of the "One Free Listen" policy, the complete history is indeed stored somewhere, even if it's not publicly visible, and this further begs the question of why it would be too much trouble to display it on the home page.

I'm too enamored with the product as well as with my newfound freedom to attempt to circumvent the limitations on free listening by simply creating a million accounts. In fact, taking into account the multiple recordings of major classical works that are available, as well as a few jazz albums which have been reissued and repackaged over the years, there are actually plenty of opportunities to hear a piece multiple times while remaining firmly within the confines of ethical behavior (I managed to find 10 versions of Stravinsky's "Symphonies of Wind Instruments," a piece my college wind ensemble played once, but which I wasn't assigned to; I wish I had been). I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I haven't purchased anything yet, and if they go belly up before I do, I'll feel lame about it. Speaking strictly about the product, though (I know nothing of their business practices) and what it does to the landscape of online listening, it seems like just the kind of operation worth supporting, while the soundbite boutiques and aspiring mind-readers seem less and less so. If anyone I've mentioned it to in person had ever used it, I wouldn't have bothered giving it so much airtime here.

A Nickel For Your Thoughts

Whenever I return to the Complete Plugged Nickel recordings of Miles Davis' 1960s quintet, I find myself compelled to share something I've realized or thought of. Tonight, it relates to the questions of structural listening and audience outreach, which have become a recurring theme on this blog lately.

As a group which had the uncanny ability to essentially improvise form, this great quintet provides a unique case study in structural listening. Most highly trained professionals would be hard-pressed to follow every last structural twist and turn the first time they heard many of these cuts, and some would be lucky to catch even a few. These are performances which, to some extent or another, level the playing field between trained and untrained ears. Hence, given their exalted place in the pantheon, it is reasonable to assume that a large part of their attractiveness lies elsewhere, namely in what might be called "surface" elements. Because the music is successful on the moment-to-moment level, one need not be able to follow the form in order to reap great pleasure from the experience.

Music that is not successful on the surface is not successful period, and one cannot make an end run around this fact merely by substituting "understanding" for "enjoying." Modern music cannot simply be explained away by positing that it must appeal to something other than the senses, for in the realm of music, that is a contradiction in terms. Technical proficiency is meaningless in absence of emotional resonance, nor does one equate to the other (just ask any musician who's held a "day job" simply to get by). This is why outreach can profitably deal in exposure but not in persuasion, and why its potential impact is neither infinite nor scalable.

Given that this issue has become so badly distorted largely due to a preponderance of pop culture colloquialisms in our contemporary musical dialogue, it's fitting that I might resort to one myself in order to illustrate my point, and that would be the idea of the "mind-blowing" listening experience. No other phrase could so capably encapsulate the value of listening without understanding! Yet there's an all-too-convenient double standard available to anyone who can't be bothered to explain themselves in anything but the vaguest of terms: when the music is good, it's "mind-blowing," when it's bad, it's "incomprehensible." If failing to understand can be either good or bad depending on the circumstances, something is mighty fishy here. There's obviously more to it than that, more than a pre-concert lecture or interactive workshop can account for.

As I've said here before, structural listening is a crap shoot in my case. It just as often detracts from the experience as enhances it. There is much music which has grown on me over time, and this has surely been attributable to structural listening in many cases, but in the case of the Plugged Nickel, I find the opposite to be true. Many of the cuts are most fascinating to me when heard on the moment-to-moment, surface level, and become, understandably, a bit harrowing once I start to mentally outline the form of the performance and compare it to the original form of the tune. This is not to say that the surface becomes less appealing, only that I am quite literally distracted from this attractive surface by my now firmly entrenched performer instincts to "hold the form" at all times. It serves as a perfect example of why I'm apprehensive about audience outreach activities aimed at simulating technical proficiency in novice listeners: technical proficiency has ruined more music for me than it has revealed, and I can't see the value of perpetrating that crime on anyone else.

Yeah, but is it Pop?

I soon realized that in the course of the previous discussion on pop, I omitted an important predilection of mine that happens to come from the pop world, that being Jimi Hendrix. Not that I'm any kind of Hendrix expert, but I do seriously dig his music. I'd venture that Hendrix's appeal is almost as universal as The Beatles', and also that it's more universal than the Beatles' among people who also happen to like atonal, modernist, and/or avant-garde music (whatever that is). If Dan had asked about Hendrix instead of the Beatles, he would have essentially been asking the same thing about me, I think, but he would have gotten a very different (and yes, probably shorter) answer, and that whole discussion would have gone in a completely different direction. Oh well.

For what it's worth, brass quintets, wedding bands, jazz combos, and pops orchestras don't cover Hendrix nearly as excessively as they cover The Beatles. That's no doubt in large part because they also do so far less successfully and they know it. Rock musicians have significantly less shame about imitating Hendrix, though they probably shouldn't. The Beatles certainly had their extramusical trials and tribulations, but perhaps Hendrix's were more well-known as they happened, and more of the kind that aren't typically discussed in polite company. I think all of these things probably factor into why The Beatles's music is seemingly thought to transcend instrumentation the way Bach's does, while Hendrix is just as popular but not covered as often or as well. I'd like to think that I could separate my own unpleasant experiences with poor imitations of an artist from my overall opinion of them, and certainly that I could prevent extramusical issues from coloring that opinion, but I'm human, and that may not be the case here. I really don't know. Gil Evans did an album of Hendrix's music that left me cold (frigid, in fact), but I still dig the original.

Stevie Wonder is an artist that many jazz musicians have covered, from Dave Pietro to Joe Gilman to The New Power Trio to Dan's own group Frankhouse. I'm not so set in my ways that I ignore and deny these kinds of trends. In fact, as I've said, the more pop music I can find that I actually like, the less I'll feel like a social outcast, and that can only be a good thing. And if so many otherwise like-minded people are into something, you'd think that would be a hint worth taking. To that end, I had the chance to investigate a Stevie Wonder box set while housesitting for a friend last year. When I saw it sitting on the rack, I got really excited. This was my chance! Well, I had to stop listening after a while. It just wasn't for me. It's galling in a way, yet not entirely surprising that while I really dig many of the jazz covers of his music that I've heard, I couldn't make it through an entire disc of the originals. Too bad for me, I guess.

I mentioned before that prog rock seems to float my boat. I'm not sure that really counts as pop music, though. Some pop people spew even more venom at prog rock than they do at classical music and jazz. It not only incorporates many elements of those more high-falutin' styles, but also hits closer to home by virtue of still being rooted, if not in some small way, in the rock and/or pop aesthetic(s). I was perusing some blogs that I don't get around to reading all that often and stumbled on a couple of posts over at Acousmata about a couple of prog groups I didn't know about:

Magma

Univers Zero

I dig both of these tracks a lot, and I'll definitely be investigating both of these bands' work more extensively at some point.

It's hard to talk intelligently about structure when you've only listened to something one time, but if there are profound large-scale structural concepts worthy of a classical musicologist's attention at work here, I missed them the first time. In fact, while I definitely dug the Univers Zero track more, the scattered nature of the structure bothered me a bit. That's usually my first and only complaint about the prog bands I'm into, which scares me, because for a long time, I resented the classical approach to form and believed in, essentially, doing what you want in that respect. It's not doing Kyle Gann's writing any sort of justice to lump him in with the clunky statement I just made, but if you read his blog, you know that he's written intelligently and repeatedly about composers (himself included) who have rebelled against such traditional formal strictures. What scares me is that while I nod in agreement when I read things like that, and always have, nonetheless, as I get older and listen to and write more music, I find myself hurtling towards the traditional perspective. It's bizarre.

By virtue of that traditional perspective, my trajectory is wholly unremarkable and quite predictable. Young people don't "get it" because they don't know anything, and once they learn something (if not everything), they see the light. It raises a question that's on the tip of most everyone's tongues these days when the pop and classical worlds collide: is this process an inherently positive, predictable, and universal one by which each and everyone of us can become an astute, structure-oriented listener and musician simply by trying, or does it represent the artificial domestication of the listener, their mere social initiation into a rarefied world of musical elitism where other perspectives are unduly dismissed as too unsophisticated?

I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that as I gain experience, structure comes to matter more. I'm more aware of it when I listen, and I agonize over it more when I write. In all but the most extreme cases, it's not enough to turn me off entirely from a piece of music that I have only good reactions to otherwise, but I wonder if the current trajectory, assuming it continues, doesn't dictate that sooner or later that will change? That thought scares me a bit, though there's nothing I can do about it. Clinging to previously held beliefs simply to avoid admitting you were wrong is always a bad idea; labeling those who are willing to admit as much as "wishy-washy" also misses the point; and purposely remaining ignorant or cutting oneself off from the learning process when it becomes obvious that this process is changing your long-held beliefs is stooping quite low, dare I say it, in a pop sort of way. That's my philosophy with regard not only to the question of structure, but also of taste. If there's a time in my future when I will worship The Beatles, then so be it.

As a parting shot, check out this band from Vancouver:

Winning

A friend hipped me to them the other night, describing it as "Free Emo." That sounds about right. I could listen to this by myself in a quiet, dark room without getting bored, the same way I listen to Lutoslawski, Ives and Monk. But is it Pop?

Surveying The Landscape Again

I'm not ashamed to admit that part of what gets me so worked up about the blogospheric trendiness I referred to in the previous post is the utter certainty on the part of the writer that by merely describing their relationship with an artist's work, they're somehow doing the rest of us this huge favor by shaking us out of our ivory tower complacency. Well, since it's Blog Month here at My Fickle Ears Dig, why not take a break from all the bellyaching I do the other 11 (and a half, it seems) months out of the year to advocate rather than castigate?

I really wish I saw Lutoslawski's name on my computer screen more often. In fact, I'm not sure this is even the first time I've said that here, but if it is, I've certainly been thinking it for some time now because it seems like I say it to myself all the time. Lutoslawski is quickly becoming one my of absolute favorite composers, and in fact threatens to be the first composer I'd ever feel comfortable naming as my one favorite composer. As I remarked earlier this month, naming favorites is a tenuous proposition when it comes to composers because few of them are consistent, and hence, most anyone's favorite composer undoubtedly wrote a lot of music that person wouldn't want to have to listen to, or at least not very often. Even so, I'm so consistently enraptured by Lutoslawski's music as to consider going that far.

What prevents me from going there right this minute is that my depth of experience is not yet great enough to warrant it. There could be a bunch of turds lurking around the corner that by sheer happenstance have somehow managed to elude me, though I doubt it. I was first introduced to Lutoslawski's music by attending concerts by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, who often programs his music. Later, I started a Pandora station, "Witold Lutoslawski Radio." I primarily use Pandora to investigate pop-oriented music that I'm merely curious about but don't want to pay for, and not usually so much for the jazz and classical idioms that I'm more committed to and perfectly willing to pay for. However, I thought it would be appropriate and funny to have at least one station centered around a thorny new-music type of artist, and Lutoslawski's name was just long enough to make it perfect for the task.

Holy shit was I in for an awakening. Though I'm hard-pressed to name specific pieces (Pandora doesn't allow specific requests; you can "bookmark" songs that pop up simply to remember what they're called, but I neglected to do that), the station seemed to be feeding me mostly pieces for solo string instruments and orchestra, probably because "a prominent cello" is a defining characteristic in their system and once I clicked thumbs up on a cello concerto, that was that. Not that I'm complaining, though; I myself have come to enjoy writing concertos more than simply writing for large ensembles because I feel like having a clear soloist forces me into writing melodies in a way that I've never been inclined to otherwise, or at least thinking more melodically rather than just texturally. This has sparked an interest in various different kinds of pieces for soloist and orchestra, and Lutoslawski's music is a good an argument as any for the continued vitality and viability of the concerto format (he rarely seems to use the word "concerto," so I guess I'm using it more out of convenience).

Most recently, through the miracle of iTunes, I purchased in digital format a 2 disc set of Lutoslawski's orchestral works for less than what a single disc fetches in the physical realm these days. I'm not yet done working through it and am already blown away. The opening track is called "Symphonic Variations for Orchestra." It was the first thing I listened to, and was not what I expected. It is very much a "crowd pleaser," or something like that, a raucous, very accessible concert-opening type of work that one would think could find its way onto programs anywhere and everywhere. Mind you that I forfeited my right to authoritatively label a piece as "accessible" in the abstract sometime around the time I was 17, when my full kookiness began to become apparent, but that fact notwithstanding, I would hope that there's a bright future for pieces like this one, which seems to me to be one of those exceedingly rare pieces that has something for everyone without stooping to the level of mere orchestrational parlor tricks. I wonder if anyone ever plays it?

The "Mi-Parti" is very different, very much what I was expecting out of this set, and a perfect example of what, to me, makes Lutoslawski's music so special. This piece is as modern sounding as anything else, totally "out" in the parlance of the jazz community, and it knocked me out of my chair the very first time I heard it. In fact, that's been the case with the vast majority of Lutoslawski's pieces that I've heard. Even for this avowed new-music kook, that's quite unusual. I can't think of an initial experience I've had with another composer's music that's even close to comparable. Elliott Carter's "Variations for Orchestra" and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony are two other favorite pieces of mine which I'd locate roughly in the same stylistic ballpark as Lutoslawski, yet I remember vividly that both of them left me rather underwhelmed on first hearing. In fact, the Shostakovich had no impact on me whatsoever, and frankly, being about halfway through his complete symphonies at the moment, that's about as much impact as any of them ever have the first time, or even subsequently. The 4th was different, for whatever reason; hearing it for the second time was probably the most purely flabbergasted I've ever been while listening to music, not only due to the weight of suddenly "getting it" all at once, but from recalling what bits and pieces I remembered clearly from the first hearing and simply wondering how it could be so different the next time.

Something about Lutoslawski is different, and I couldn't possibly try to explain what it is at this point because I don't know. I'd be happy to go on not knowing if the whole thing didn't make me so damn curious. Of course, it's external factors that are responsible for that curiosity, namely the odious bickering over the very validity of atonal music and the specious overgeneralizations about the people who write it, play it and listen to it. Exhibit A amongst those overgeneralizations is the idea that the music cannot be accessible, that it can fruitfully only be studied, not heard, and that it cannot make a positive impression on first hearing. I'm just one person, but those observations simply do not resonate with me, and they never did, even back when my naivete entitled me to quite a bit more authority as a "regular audience member" than I have now that I've been to music school and tried to make a career of it. While in past years I may have searched momentarily for an example, I now have one at the immediate ready. Lutoslawski's music, as atonal and modernist as it gets, is some of the most accessible music I've ever heard. I'm wondering if no one else agrees with me, or if it's just that none of them have a blog.