Fromm and Maccoby on Cultural Stimuli

In our discussion thus far we have paid little attention to the problem of the happiness of the peasant. In fact, we have stressed the economic advantage of the productive orientation, but said little of the subjective factor of satisfaction and contentment. In order to understand this problem better, we must have in mind the important fact, mentioned in Chapter 5, that the village is a cultural and spiritual desert. The values which existed for the precapitalistic peasant, and which Tawney has described so succinctly, have virtually disappeared because they are in blatant contradiction to the spirit of a society in the process of industrialization. The friendly, purposeless conversation, the fiesta, the sitting around, and the sweetness of doing nothing, which in a society with precapitalist values and traditions were subjectively very satisfying, are rapidly losing their place within the Mexican village of the 20th Century. This is so because such values and traditions cannot grow unless they are rooted in the spirit of the total culture; furthermore, the economically successful peasants, who are of the productive-hoarding type, and who dominate the village, have cut off the expenditures for fiestas and all other forms of "uneconomical" recreations. Thus the receptive peasant is left with nothing except the cheap entertainment of radio, television, movies, and comic strips. The easy access to liquor (actively promoted by the industry producing alcoholic beverages) is all that is left to make use of his free time. The picture of the "good life" portrayed by television and radio increases even more the sense of worthlessness of the purposeless life, and increases the receptive peasant's sense of defeat and hopelessness.

... It is our experience that villages in which a richer cultural tradition is still alive (such as Tepoztlán or Tzintzuntzan) have probably a somewhat larger percentage of productive-receptive characters, and it is a legitimate speculation to assume that cultures like medieval society, in which man and living are the overriding goals, while not creating the characterological basis for hard and relentless effort, and not a great deal of individualism, offer the possibility for the development of the productive-receptive orientation. Both in the case of the village today, and in the case of a village in an unbroken, humanly rich culture, productiveness develops when the economic and the cultural reality permits and stimulates the kind of activity which is the essence of productiveness.

To return to the peasant of our village, while many are characterologically motivated for hard work, they have little enjoyment. Life is seen as a struggle to keep afloat. By orienting themselves more and more to the market, to profits and material gain, the productive-hoarding peasants are increasingly influenced by the new class of entrepreneurs to give up traditional fiestas as a waste of money, to work harder to buy more consumer goods, and to provide schooling for their children so that they can leave the village. While the cane growers cling to a way of life that leaves them increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, the productive-hoarding peasants do as much as possible to pull themselves into the modern society. A combination of factors including the values of the industrial society, pressures from the new entrepreneurs, rising prices, and new consumer demands all favor an orientation toward cash crops, capital investment, and status in terms of income. But the given limitations of their economic success are such that the vast majority of the productive-hoarding peasants can never earn enough to consider themselves successful in terms of the city economy, or even in terms of the new village entrepreneurs. All they have is hard work, little reward, and the constant risk of being run over by forces they can neither predict nor control. They must look at themselves in the eyes of the industrial world as underdeveloped. (134-135)

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

Here, then, is a lovely functional role for The Arts (as part of Culture) that does not require the actual artistic production to be functional. Culture makes life worth living, and thus it is lived better with Culture at its side. What else? Culture here in the end is still subservient; the notion that it aids productivity can never be formulated in a way that does not also simultaneously contradict the emphasis on Just Because. In fact here EF and MM actually propose this remedy only for one particular personality type, which raises a second set of questions: what about the other types? Must we assume that diversity in this sphere is inevitable and hence that having proper outlets available for all types is a matter of justice? Or do we go so far as to identify benefits and drawbacks of each type and then set about devising policy that we hope trickles down all the way to the process of character formation? Oy.

For me there is an even more chilling/fraught issue here. It seems quite agreeable that life is better all around when we have pleasuable cultural outlets available to us. But as the contemporary Creative Class as theorized by Florida has demonstrated, a supremely well-developed intellectual and entrepreneurial class does not actually need an accompanying culture which matches the sophistication of their day jobs; rather, a variety of "peasant"-level diversions is plenty adequate (preferred, actually), the differences in form being merely superficial ones in the larger sense and dictated rather predictably by time and place. (Quoth Florida, if memory serves: "some would say much of this is superficial, and much of it is." No shit!) Of course some of us were bound to lose our ways and apply our productive characters, intellects, and bourgeois comforts towards art itself, without having a day job. Hence the "decadent" post-industrial phase, portending a final collapse. It would be awfully satisfying to be able to respond to this charge with sociological evidence that productive characters crave cultural engagement which matches the sophistication of the rest of their lives. However we define "sophistication," though, it's hard to see anyone alive today who is NOT simply a full-time artist themselves truly breaking out of the realm of "cheap entertainments," for the simple reason that they don't NEED (psychologically) to. If they did, they would! The Creative Class has enough money to afford to do so! Hence the authors lapse just a bit in permitting THEIR contempt for "the cheap entertainment of radio, television, movies, and comic strips" to shine forth. Really the problem is not cheapness but rather inauthenticity. These cultural artifacts are, simply, artifacts of a different culture; they are not "rooted in the spirit of the total culture." Perhaps that can be said of certain subsets of the Creative Class as well, and perhaps they'll be the ones to eventually drift towards High Art in their leisure time while their friends mock them mercilessly.

At the start of the study we asked ourselves whether the villagers would respond to more cultural stimuli if they were offered to them. To answer the question, we brought experimental stimuli to the village; they included the choir of the National University of Mexico, folk dancers, and folk singers. A reading group was formed...where each week those who were interested might come and listen to fairy tales, and to novels especially about Mexico and about peasants in other parts of the world. A group of 20 women and 2 men regularly attended the readings. They particularly enjoyed a novel about the peasants of the region during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 as well as Grimm's Fairy Tales and the stories by Tolstoy about Russian peasants. It was notable that they identified themselves with the attitudes, fears, and strivings of the European peasant. Furthermore, for the first three years of the study, motion pictures were also regularly shown by the study. At first the aim was to have comments and discussions about the films... many villagers felt reluctant to attend a performance when they did not pay for it. However, when they were encouraged to comment on the films, their comments were sensitive and perceptive.

Each villager was rated in terms of his or her participation in the cultural activities introduced by the study. Thirty percent of the villagers participated at one time or another, while 70 percent never participated... For the men there was a significant correlation between productiveness and cultural participation. ...

Why is it that the unproductive and receptive villagers do not respond to new cultural stimulation? First of all, the nature of the unproductive person is that he does not respond to stimuli, that he is passive. Furthermore, some of the particular stimuli might even have made him feel worse, in that they have reminded him of the values that represent the dominant ethic of material gain and progress and which would make him appear irresponsible and lazy. Even some of the folk stories tend to emphasize the values and moralizing of hoarding free peasants in Europe. ... If the passive-receptive villagers are to respond to cultural stimuli, it would seem that these would have to be of a different type in the context of new economic conditions that promise a better future for these people. (141-142)

A noble effort in the broadest sense, I think, but also seemingly oblivious to a couple of key points. (As always, points that the Cultural specialist would not have overlooked, whatever our other blind spots might be.) First, the authenticity problem mentioned before has not been solved here, or not REsolved at least. The presentation of both indigenous and imported peasant-themed literature certainly counts for something, and the resonances with other people from other parts of the world could be powerful. Even so, there is only so far this kind of progress can go without completing the circle as it were, i.e. nurturing and eliciting creative agency in the local polity. From my vantage point within today's outreach paradigm, the apparent limitation of this study's cultural outreach purview to the presentation of existing artifacts stands out. Certainly this is the necessary starting point; one does not go straight to cultural creation in such a scenario, but I think that the effect EF and MM clearly are seeking necessitates that agency be an eventual goal. This is NOT to say that "peasant" art can meet all needs, or that "local" production necessarily has some special metaphysical quality, or that every peasant should/must become some kind of artist. It is merely to point out that such outside studies cannot remain responsible for a village's cultural life indefinitely. At some point they must teach the man to fish, as the saying goes.

I'm not oblivious to the many and varied potential reasons why this was not attempted, but I am always surprised when it is not even addressed. The authors remark a few times that many of these peasants are in fact time-rich, which obliterates the first/best argument of various Communist oppositions to "bourgeois art" being offered up to their people; but then the conclusion that most such peasants here are time-rich because unproductive/receptive, cane planters, etc. indicates that those with the time won't benefit (can't, really) from "cultural stimuli" of any kind. The "good" ones, then, just like in American high schools, are by virtue of their breadth of interests and "good" qualities actually somewhat more strapped for time, and this intentionally and probably happily. Hence something of an impasse which is not easily massaged.

In any case, though I'm usually the ultimate skeptic of art-as-proxy for various types of general personal development in the post-industrial world, in the world here described by EF and MM, where a sizeable minority manage to achieve unmistakable inner genuineness and warmth against all odds only to have it somewhat locked inside of them by dysfunctional cultural/behavioristic norms, the potential for art therapy seems greater.

[from a notebook, 2016 or 2017]

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.

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.

More Inreach

Since the "Death of Music" discussion invariably intersects with the audience outreach and development discussion, here's a follow-up on the latter, which was actually in the works well before the former got me all riled up. Sometimes things just work out...

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It seems to me that form is generally thought to be the musico-technical area where the novice and the specialist differ most greatly, perhaps even on as basic a level as merely being aware of the concept of a structural "big picture" in the first place. As such, it has become the go-to topic for many an outreach activity. This is not to say that the words "form" or "structure" are necessarily used all that frequently in such cases; they may not be used at all, but nevertheless, the idea that the ability to identify structural landmarks is what separates people who "get it" from people who don't seems to hold sway with quite a few musical missionaries.

There are larger issues here which I've chosen to gloss over for now, such as how long it takes for such musico-technical training to meaningfully sink in, and whether or not it is, in fact, the key ingredient to engaging and retaining new listeners in the first place. In the interest of space, I would again refer readers to my previous post on the topic, where these issues are discussed a bit more thoroughly. For the moment, let's just assume that the answers to those last two questions are both affirmative; why, then, choose to focus on form, and what are the consequences of this choice?

I posited above that form represents the most severe disconnect between professional musicians and new listeners. Many academics would tell us that "moment-to-moment" listening is shallow and limited, representing the ultimate inability to see the forest for the trees. The integration, development, and transformation of themes that classical theorists and musicologists tend latch on to often occurs across many minutes or even hours of music. In their defense, it bears pointing out that hour-long instrumental pieces have ceased to be novel in classical music ever since Beethoven, who died almost two centuries ago. Even so, such large-scale structural awareness remains a foreign concept to listeners with a history of nearly exclusive exposure to shorter musical forms. These shorter forms most certainly deal in variation and repetition as well, but the overall temporal units are significantly smaller and material is typically repeated much more literally.

As for explaining why certain people gravitate towards certain music, the nature-versus-nurture discussion is endlessly intriguing, but I don't think it lends itself particularly well to reverse engineering for the purpose of proselytizing for new audiences. I sense that it's neither practical nor desirable to attempt to gain control over listeners with the goal of achieving a specific outcome, and that there will always be numerous exceptions to any rule one might be tempted to establish. I do think it's safe to say that even listeners who bear an innate predisposition for structural contemplation will never experience it if they never have the opportunity, and hence that if nothing else, there's certainly good work to be done in the realm of take-it-or-leave-it exposure. I also think it's crucial to establish that structural awareness is not anathema to moment-to-moment listening, but in fact encompasses it; that they are not different things, but that one is a necessary precondition to the other; and that those who believe in the primacy of "the big picture" ought not forget this.

Moment-to-moment listening may be limited; it may gloss over the greatest accomplishments of many great musicians; and its predominance over structural listening among novice classical and jazz listeners may in fact be a direct consequence of an overly pervasive pop music aesthetic; but its primacy to the listening experience is undeniable and its influence is inescapable, whether in professional musicologists, rank amateur musicians, or the most musically naive among us. If the moment-to-moment sounds of a piece turn us off, then the whole piece turns us off. It's that simple. In absence of an attraction to what is commonly called music's "surface," mere "appreciation" (what an awful term) of the structure and development of a piece is not merely worthless, but I would think downright impossible.

While new music detractors love to accuse their enemies of exactly this pose, I've always had my doubts as to whether this is actually the case, there or anywhere else. I don't believe that atonal music is incapable of having an attractive surface simply by virtue of being atonal, and I certainly don't believe that anyone who claims such an attraction to atonal music is necessarily posing. But most importantly, I also don't believe that we can expect those for whom the surface of any particular piece is not attractive to simply ignore it and focus exclusively on structural elements instead. That's asking way too much.

You can dance around the surface all you want, but you can't make people ignore it. No one can ignore it, and they shouldn't ignore it anyway for crying out loud. That's just silly. One comes to care about (or even bother to think about) form only after the surface has drawn them in, but this process is one which can't be meddled with, forcibly drilled in, or lectured into behaving properly. Some may find it more plausible that structural listening could be taught, and that is undoubtedly how form has become the centerpiece of so many outreach activities, but even so, that's putting the cart before the horse. It's a sham, and neither an honest nor an effective way of addressing a shortage of butts in seats.

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While I've been using atonality as an example to this point, what got me writing this post in the first place was actually not atonal music at all, but rather jazz music. While classical musicologists certainly love them some large-scale tonality, I think that jazz musicians are even more prone to agonize over form when it comes to outreach than are classical people. The forms that jazz was built on are popular music forms, and hence, it is that much more agonizing for a jazz musician to be told by a pop-literate audience member after a performance that they have no idea what the hell just happened. That this happens all the time should tell us something about the respective roles of structural and surface listening. It should also leave us looking in, not out, for a solution.

There is, indeed, some common ground to work with here if our goal is merely to explain what, in fact, did just happen structurally and how it's not all that different from what happens elsewhere. Here as always, though, the problem with dealing so heavily in larger temporal units is that one sells short moment-to-moment sound and continuity. Form may ultimately prove to be important or even essential in creating a lasting relationship with the music, but there are so many other things that can turn off a listener long before they even have a chance to become meaningfully aware of it. I'm not nitpicking about audiophile subtleties, either; I'm talking about things as basic as instruments being too loud or too soft, or people who dislike the sound of a particular timbre or harmony.

Like it or not, these moment-to-moment concerns are make-or-break concerns, but I don't believe for a second that the solution is for listeners to ignore them in favor of ungrounded structural contemplation, nor is it for musicians to merely pander to the lowest common denominator. To the contrary, I believe that mere exposure is more powerful than proselytizing, and that our goal as musicians should not be to convince as many people as possible to tolerate us, but to reach the particular people (however few of them there are) for whom our music is enough by itself, without marketing, proselytizing or peer pressure. I also have come to believe through experience that sharing a performance with these listeners is eminently more fulfilling and enjoyable than the alternative, no matter how few of them there are.

As musicians, it is as important to respect the informed judgments of listeners who reject our work as it is to seek out those to whom it appeals. As such, I believe that the way to reach new listeners is not to subsume one's voice in the most marketable styles, but to invest the necessary time and effort to consummate this voice on its own terms. In short, what I'm saying is that rather than doing music different, we ought to do music better, reaching in, not out, for a solution. Big of me to issue such a challenge, since I could certainly work harder and play better myself, but I want to hone in on one particular facet of jazz performance that we could all stand to do better at, though, unfortunately, it's too often out of our control.

Generalizations are always dangerous, but I've come to believe (long before writing this) that "clarity" is an excellent catch-all term for what distinguishes great jazz performances from the rest of them. Furthermore, I would hypothesize that performances which fail to attain a high degree of so-called "clarity" don't stand a chance in hell of engaging the uninitiated listener (nor an experienced one for that matter). I would propose that instead of wasting our time reaching out by lecturing people about bridges and turnarounds, perhaps we should reach in and make it our single-minded goal to achieve an ideal level of "clarity" in our jazz performances.

What do I mean by clarity? Many things, but first and foremost, it's an acoustical matter. There are exceedingly few rooms that truly suit jazz's acoustic identity, and even fewer competent engineers capable of achieving truly balanced and clear live sound in them. Of course, balance and clarity are primary technical concerns of any musician or ensemble worth their salt, but these battles are hard won and the deck can too easily be stacked against us. Just ask symphony orchestras, who not only spend countless hours fine tuning balance issues, but typically have spent eight- or nine-figure sums of money designing and constructing their own performance spaces with the input of multiple eminent world experts on acoustics. Not surprising when one considers that issues of "clarity" or "transparency" can make or break the careers and reputations of their music directors; suffice it to say that if the same were true in jazz, there would be a lot of broken careers out there.

In jazz, the string players don't come in 10-packs (thank god), the percussion are not in the very back of a large hall, and the very directional winds and brass are not always able or willing to point in the right direction, yet the traditional small jazz group has at least one member of each of these instrumental families represented, and along with them, a built-in acoustical nightmare. The rare ensemble which has taken the time and trouble to achieve a clear acoustic balance in their rehearsal space will likely find the venues at which they perform to be both drastically different acoustically, and, in the form of their proprietors, drastically less willing to accommodate an acoustic performance in the first place, hence taking matters of balance and clarity out of the hands of trained and experienced musicians and putting them in the hands of whichever bartender happens to be doing sound that night. Eight- or nine-figure sums of money would indeed solve the problem, but that's a pipe dream for all but a select few jazz organizations, and even those for whom it is a reality seem strangely content to continue performing in concert halls that were designed specifically for symphony orchestras.

While acoustical clarity is paramount in any musical performance, the element of my broad concept of "clarity" that more directly relates to the above discussion about audience outreach in jazz is that of structural clarity, and specifically, I believe, harmonic clarity. I'm not unaware of the pitfalls of putting such a concept on a pedestal: there are styles of jazz I enjoy immensely where it simply isn't a concern, as well as plenty of performances which strive to attain it, fail miserably, yet somehow are effective in some other way. I'm not trashing people who can't or won't play changes by way of a conscious artistic choice, I'm just trying to relate the concept of clarity to the audience outreach activities I'm aware of in the jazz area, which typically deal with the common practice "mainstream" bebop and post-bop styles of the 1940's, 50's and 60's. Within that very narrow stylistic area, I have no reservations whatsoever about saying that harmonic clarity is what separates the men from the boys.

So, giving the benefit of the doubt for just a second to those who advocate for form-centric audience outreach, let's establish that harmonic clarity is an absolute precondition for a jazz listening experience that is more structural and less moment-to-moment. This is not to say that the changes need be played the same way every time, just that the structure of the tune is clear at all times. Performances by eminent jazz musicians who purposely obliterate the original changes usually achieve far greater clarity than those by novice musicians who are just trying to "get through" the tune by playing it the same way every time. In the right hands, the three A sections of an improvisation over an AABA structure each have their own character, and I have several times walked into a performance in progress and known immediately not only which tune was being played but which A section I was hearing. That says something about me, too, a fact which advocates of musico-technical outreach would be quick to point out; but it also says something about the band, for as I'm sure may of you reading this can relate to, I have also gotten hopelessly lost in the form on many occasions, both listening and playing, while in the company of incompetent players performing material I know upside down and backwards.

Performing jazz is not about merely "following" the abstract structure, but rather about listening and reacting to those around you. That's why on the rare occasion that an eminent jazz musician drops an A section, the band stays together and sounds good doing it, and why when a student musician drops an A section, the other students in the band get lost immediately and everything falls apart. I am by no means convinced that our goal in reaching out to new listeners ought to be to teach them to experience the performance like a player, but if it is, then let's establish that merely drilling them on how to keep track of A's and B's doesn't qualify as such a thing in the first place.

Two musicians came to mind immediately when I started thinking about the clarity issue, and they are both pianists: Fred Hersch and Kenny Barron. If I were leading a new listener recruitment effort, these two would be my go-to guys when it came time to play records for the group. In my mind, their playing is as close to the ideal embodiment of "clarity" in bebop and post-bop jazz as I've ever heard, not just harmonically, but also technically and structurally. Their playing, compositions and arrangements are not only accessible but downright catchy on a moment-to-moment level as well. As for other instruments, my horn section dream team would be Terrell Stafford, Vincent Herring and Conrad Herwig. Dave Holland and Tain Watts would fill out the rhythm section.

Of course, you're not going to get this band together tomorrow and start running out to high school auditoriums in rural Minnesota, and even if you could, we all know that with musical ensembles, the whole is not always equal to the sum of its parts. I made the list for two reasons: first, to try to give the reader an idea of what exactly I meant by "clarity," and second, to make the point that when it comes to audience development, it's not worth bothering unless we put our best foot forward. We all know that outreach is inextricably linked with grant funding, and that many grants either require it as a precondition to the project, or offer additional funding above and beyond the initial award if the recipient adds it to their plan. What this means, though, is that most of the time, it's not the Clarity Dream Team providing the music, but rather some other team of grant funded musicians whose success in securing funding may or may not correspond to their musical abilities.

I'm not trashing anyone who's ever had a grant. There are a gazillion musicians out there who fall somewhere in between competent and brilliant, and that's sufficient for most purposes most of the time. Nonetheless, if the band, the room, and the soundperson alike can't deliver the musical goods to the newbies, it's a waste of time from an outreach perspective, and we'd be better served to go practice until this is no longer the case. That many musicians rely on this funding is unfortunate, a fact which lays bare my greatest reservation about the concept of outreach: the uncomfortable balance of selfless and selfish motivations that it requires. Human beings are generally too inherently selfish to strike this pose effectively, and hence, I feel that directing our efforts in rather than out is both the most productive and honest approach when it comes time to present our music to someone for the first time.

Reaching Out? Try Looking In.

If you keep up with what I write in this space, you know that I have quite a bit of trepidation about audience outreach, particularly the idea that fostering a better technical understanding of the music will equate to greater enjoyment/fulfillment/appreciation/enlightenment/salvation/whatever we're calling it now. (All of those terms are problematic in some way, so I don't know what else to do other than to make a list. Did I leave anything out?)

To this end, I had a thought-provoking conversation with a bandmate on the way home from rehearsal the other night, centered around the issue of drawing in listeners who don't normally listen to jazz, and/or don't "get it," so to speak. My friend argued as many have, that we can't take for granted the roles that our own training and experience have played in shaping our listening, and that sharing these insights with the audience has the potential to draw them in. One problem I have with this line of thinking is that bringing a true novice up to speed in this way cannot possibly be accomplished in a single evening because the volume of information is simply too great, and hence, the best we can do under the circumstances is usually so incredibly vague and oversimplified that it has no practical value whatsoever (see: Ken Burns Jazz). But even if we could teach a new listener everything we know about music all at once, I'm not convinced that we should. I, for one, enjoy music far less when I "get it," and my musical training and experience has ruined far more music for me than it has drawn me in to.

This isn't something I'm saying just to grandstand or be provocative. I remember vividly how my very first theory classes in high school almost immediately began to drain my enthusiasm for common practice classical music, and how having names for chord qualities and inversions and realizing that I could now identify them by ear became a distraction that I was powerless to ignore. It only got worse when the topic of large-scale form was introduced. At the time, I likened it to a news ticker running through my head from which I was powerless to look away while listening. I complained to my parents (accomplished musicians, both of them), but they seemed to think it was more cute than anything else, and didn't realize what a burden it was becoming.

It took music that I couldn't analyze on the fly to get me engaged again, and in the intervening 10 years or so, that has not yet changed. I often can't tell what in the world composers like Ives, Messiaen, Hindemith, Monk and Shorter are doing harmonically without taking those particular moments out of time and studying them closely and repeatedly, but when I do decide to go this route, it's not because the music has left me cold and I want to figure out what I'm missing. Quite the opposite, actually: it's because even though I can't seem to grasp what's going on under the surface, I'm just too damn curious to go on not knowing because I like what I'm hearing so much. And sad as it makes me to say it, I'm still bored to tears by most common practice era classical music, and it's getting worse by the day, almost to the point of disbelief considering the role it played in getting me to where I am.

Close study of a recording or a score is rewarding in its own way, but it invariably reduces my enjoyment of listening to the piece, and I have often made my very favorite music off limits for analysis. The music I study with a musicologist's eye has to be treasured without being irreplaceable, cleverly constructed without being downright ingenious. Sometimes, the decision is agonizing. One item under such consideration on an ongoing basis is Wayne Shorter's solo from "If I We're A Bell" from Disc 4 of the complete Plugged Nickel. The idea of never getting around to transcribing this solo scares me in a way, but not half as much as the prospect of never again being able to hear it naively.

In short, what has turned me against musico-techinical audience outreach is the realization that what's best for the trained musician part of me is often hazardous to the naive listener part of me. I would insist that the latter never completely dies in those of us with formal training, or at least that we shouldn't let it if we can help it. This is easier said than done, though. As both a listener and also as a composer (though definitely not as a player, for obvious reasons) I'd give anything to reclaim some of the naivete that I brought to my earliest musical experiences. I simply can't imagine why anyone would voluntarily give that up, and moreover, why we as the "professionals," the people who supposedly "know better," would want to take that away from our audience. It seems like the opposite should be true, that we would want as many people as possible to remain naive for fear that the alternative might do irreparable harm.

Obviously, I can't argue with any authority that traditional listener outreach has the same effect on its intended targets as my musical training has had on me, but I think it's a bit more plausible to assume that it hasn't been nearly as effective as its creators would lead us to believe. For starters, this sort of outreach has been around for a long time, and yet if you believe the talk from some of its most ardent proponents, things just continue to get worse in terms of attendance at and overall interest in both jazz and classical music performances. Consider also the attrition rate in undergraduate music schools, where theorists and musicologists are presented with a captive audience of young people with an avowed interest in and ability for music, yet somehow manage to consistently alienate a sizable majority of them to the point of quitting. It's not a perfect analogy, but undergraduate academic musical training certainly emphasizes many of the same concepts as traditional listener outreach, and its success rate is miniscule. I'd argue once again that musicians' relationship to their technical training is generally not as rosy as some would make it out to be, and that this ought to serve as a cautionary tale for anyone conducting an outreach program.

So what is there to be done, if not outreach? Inreach. To get started, we must accept that no form of music yet created has been received favorably by every single person who ever encountered it, and it's crazy to expect that this will ever change. We can't help it if this hurts our wallet, but we can at least decide not to let it hurt our feelings. Truly respecting an audience means giving them the opportunity to engage with the music on their own terms, and to form an opinion based on this. We must not take their opinion personally when it is unfavorable as this creates social pressure to be positive at all times, potentially forcing listeners into dishonesty and suppression of their true feelings. When such social barriers to honesty are mitigated, it's true that many possible converts will walk away without so much as a second thought, but it's also true that those who stick around will stick around for a longer time and in a much more genuine fashion than those who could potentially be herded around only with considerable effort.

To label this a "laissez-faire" philosophy is to miss the point. There's quite a bit we can do to advocate for our music without imposing tenuous assumptions about why we "get it" on people who are very different from us. A more pressing problem which surfaces in those of us with "training" than that it changes how we listen is that it changes how we view those who lack it. This is not merely to say that it leads us to despise them; clearly, that is not always true, but in any case, it nonetheless renders us unable to legitimately put ourselves in their shoes for the sake of argument. In the abstract, the words "ignorance" and "naivete" clearly have different connotations, but when it comes to interpreting sentient reality, it can be difficult or impossible for us to distinguish them from each other. At the risk of overreaching, I would argue that listening is more about being happy than it is about being smart, but even if you disagree, the argument is really less about which is preferable than about whether or not one is the most direct path to the other. I can't help but think about all the music school dropouts again and conclude that it's not.

Whenever we were reading Shakespeare in one of my High School English classes, it would quickly become apparent that, while we were able to follow the plot well enough, the archaic dialect was preventing us from catching any of the more subtle features of the text, especially the jokes. Needless to say, if you have to explain a joke after it has been told, you've already lost your chance to make it funny, but typically, that's exactly what the teacher would end up doing. Also typically, they fell completely flat on a bunch of 15 year-olds who would have rather been outside playing basketball. Such seems to me to be the case with listening also. Just telling the audience that "This is the bridge" and expecting them to start having a good time is like telling them "That joke was funny" and expecting them to laugh.

Many would (and have) argued that letting listeners keep their naivete merely equates to losing all hope of them ever listening to us. I would counter that the role of missionary is no less hubristic in music than it is in religion. I've always detected just a hint of doublethink in the word "outreach," since such efforts toward new listener retention seem to do more grasping than reaching. Perhaps by looking within, we can find confidence without hubris, and along with it, the ability to accept the consequences of letting our music speak for itself, whatever they might be.