Sennett—The Craftsman (iii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

[149]

CHAPTER 5

The Hand

Technique has a bad name; it can seem soulless. That's not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression. This chapter takes a first step in investigating the connection.

Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant casually remarked, "The hand is the window on to the mind." Modern science has sought to make good on this observation. ...

The Degradation of Sport

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)


V

The Degradation of Sport

[100] Like sex, drugs, and drink, they [sports] obliterate awareness of everyday reality, but they do this not by dimming awareness but by raising it to a new level of concentration.

A crucial distinction which deserves to be taken seriously.

...

The uselessness of games makes them offensive to social reformers, improvers of public morals, or functionalist critics of society like Veblen, who saw in the futility of upper-class sports anachronistic survivals of militarism and prowess. Yet the "futility" of play, and nothing else, explains its appeal... Games quickly lose their charm when forced into the service of education, character development, or social improvement.

Yep.

And if so, then the distinction between

dimming awareness

and

raising it to a new level of concentration,

this distinction becomes quite important. It's easiest for play to get forced into service based on what it does well. Failing that, the forcers have to start off by lying about what it does well, which is not too difficult but is at least more difficult than the first way.

Lasch—Instrumental and Practical Reason

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

The antidote to instrumental reason is practical reason, not mysticism, spirituality, or the power of "personhood." In the Aristotelian tradition of political theory, phronesis or practical reason describes the development of character, the moral perfection of life, and the virtues specific to various forms of practical activity. Technique, on the other hand, concerns itself exclusively with the means appropriate to a given end. The highest form of practice, for Aristotle and his followers, is politics, which seeks to promote the good life by conferring equal rights on all citizens and by establishing rules and conventions designed not so much to solve the problems of social living as to encourage citizens to test themselves against demanding standards of moral excellence... The Aristotelian conception of practice has more in common with play than with activities defined as practical in the modern sense. Practices in the Aristotelian sense have nothing to do, as such, with the production of useful objects or with satisfying material needs. ...

The classical conception carries with it a certain contempt for the production of material comforts and useful objects...; but it nevertheless enables us to identify one of the disinctive features of the industrial worldview: its instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity. Instrumentalism regards the relation of ends and means as purely external, whereas the older tradition, now almost forgotten, holds that the choice of the means appropriate to a given end has to be considered as it contributes to internal goods as well. In other words, the choice of means has to be governed by their conformity to standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities for self-understanding and self-mastery. Industrial societies conceive of the extension of human powers only as the replacement of human labor by machinery. As work and politics lose their educative content and degenerate into pure technique, the very distinction between technique and practice becomes incomprehensible. Industrial societies have almost completely lost sight of the possibility that work and politics can serve as character-forming disciplines. These activities are now understood strictly as means of satisfying material needs. Moral ideas, meanwhile, lose their connection with practical life and with the virtues specific to particular practices and become confused instead with the exercise of purely personal choices and the expression of personal prejudices and tastes, which can be neither justified nor explained and which should therefore not be regarded as binding on anyone else.

(pp. 253-255)

As regards the extrinsic benefits of music education, there are at least two ways to parse this

degenerat[ion] into pure technique
.

There is the

pure technique
of the
soulless technician

and
the

pure technique
of the
postindustrial worker

.

These twin degenerations have very different ramifications, but they come from the same place: the desire for control; which incidentally, for Lasch, also underlies the elite desire to escape the common lot and to divest from civic enagagement and public services.

It is my experience of music educators (and of my own younger self) that the throttle of control is, in the sphere of education, much more delicate than we would like it to be.

Precisely because

the choice of the means appropriate to a given end has to be considered
,

it follows that when the "end" itself has simply been dictated to the student rather than arising from their own inclinations, the search for "means" can never be all that it could and should be.

Indeed,

The Aristotelian conception of practice has more in common with play than with activities defined as practical in the modern sense
;

and there is precious little play in running scales and arpeggios unless you yourself have decided that this is what you really, dearly want to be doing.

This is not a new idea. It is not imcompatible, I don't think, with a traditional, technique-centric music pedagogy. What it is fully imcompatible with, rather, is the desire for control, for accountability, for measurable outcomes, for teacher sets clear expectations for students. It ceases to be possible after the instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity which attaches to the doctrine that music makes kids smart.

At this point in history, it is essential to question the boundless confidence in human powers that acknowledges no limits, which finds its ultimate expression in the technology of nuclear warfare. But this cannot be done by disavowing all forms of purposive intelligence or by dissolving the subject-object distinction that allegedly underlies it... Selfhood—an obsolete idea, according to Bateson and other proponents of the "new consciousness"—is precisely the inescapble awareness of man's contradictory place in the natural order of things.

This "awareness" of inescapble contradiction seems to me to lead unavoidably to at least some of the central conceits of postmodernism, the same conceits which Lasch quite vehemently rejects in his discussion of art. This I find puzzling.

Advocates of a cultural revolution echo the dominant culture not only in their confusion of practice with technique but in their equation of selfhood with the rational ego. Like their opponents, they see rationality as the essence of selfhood. Accordingly, they argue for a "resurrection of the body," for "feminine" intuition and feeling against the instrumental reason of the male, for the alleged aimlessness of play, and for the "poetic imagination," as Bateson puts it, as a corrective to "false reifications of the 'self.'" The distinguishing characteristic of selfhood, however, is not rationality but the critical awareness of man's divided nature. Selfhood expresses itself in the form of a guilty conscience, the painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations. "Bad conscience is inseparable from freedom," Jacques Ellul reminds us. "There is no freedom without an accompanying critical attitude to the self," and this "excess of freedom and the critical turning back upon the self that freedom begets," he adds, "are at the source of dialectical thinking and the dialectical interpretation of history."
(pp. 257-258)



As for the party of the superego, it equates conscience not with an awareness of the dialectical relationships between freedom and the capacity for destruction but with adherance to a received body of authoritative moral law. It hankers for the restoration of punitive sanctions against disobedience, above all for the restoration of fear.

A perfect capsule rejoinder here of the view that an armed society is a polite society.

It forgets that conscience (as distinguished from the superego) originates not so much in the "fear of God" as in the urge to make amends. Conscience arises not so much from the dread of reprisals by those we have injured or wish to injure as in the capacity for mourning and remorse.

(pp. 258-259)

Bodies and Artifacts (iv-b)—Jean and LeRoi together again

(previously)

Whereas Jean makes much of

the elements of craft, technique, proven methods which make the artist a worker in a working world,
(p. 406)

LeRoi bends over backward to downplay this part.

as I have said before, Negro music is the result of certain more or less specific ways of thinking about the world. Given this consideration, all talk of technical application is certainly after the fact.
(p. 211)

And earlier,

The trumpets, trombones, and tubas of the brass bands were played with a varying amount of skill, though when a man has learned enough about an instrument to play the music he wants to play, "skill" becomes an arbitrary consideration.
(p. 75)

This last statement especially lays bare the disjuncture, since for Jean skill cannot be arbitrary, and the reason it cannot be arbitrary is because it forms a/the basis upon which a newly-minted work of art, no matter how stylistically esoteric, is never quite as unfamiliar as the plebes' visceral indigestion tells them that it is. Jean's theory is every bit as sociological as LeRoi's, but the two writers appeal to this sociological angle with entirely different agendas in mind.

Bodies and Artifacts (iii)—Jones' Voice

LeRoi Jones
Blues People (1963)

For a Westerner to say that the Wagnerian tenor's voice is "better" than the African singer's or the blues singer's is analogous to a non-Westerner disparaging Beethoven's Ninth Symphony because it wasn't improvised.
(p. 30)

So what if a Westerner says this about Beethoven? What if a small but vocal subculture emerges within the Western world itself where this disparagement of Beethoven is nothing less than the storefront signage, the secret handshake, and the honor code all rolled into one? What if several such subcultures emerge independently, and what if they have little else in common among them besides this?

What tf then?

Bodies and Artifacts (i)—Sennett's Graffiti

Richard Sennett
The Conscience of the Eye (1990)

I often saw this graffiti [of the New York subways] in my mind's eye when I listened to my son play the violin. The Suzuki violin method teaches a child to play music before he or she knows the names of the notes; the method stresses beauty of tone and expression from the first lesson. When a pupil first begins the violin in the Suzuki method, the teacher therefore performs a generous act. On the neck of the violin the teacher tapes down two little strips of blue plastic, so that the student knows exactly where to place his or her first, second, or third fingers... The beginner is thus spared that excruciating experience of playing sour, out-of-tune notes. By converting the violin into something like a guitar, the teacher makes the student the gift of pitch.

At first the student accepts this gift without reservation. You put your fingers down exactly where the tapes are and that's that—you've solved the problem of pitch. In this early stage one of the tapes on my son's violin once came off by accident; he asked me to fix the instrument so that he could play again. I suggested, with the parent's knowing, infuriating helpfulness, that he find instead where the finger goes by listening to the sound it makes. This proposal would have robbed my son, however, of the certainty with which he began.

As the lessons went forward he learned more and more to listen to how he sounded, and in the process those little bits of tape began to annoy him too. There was the day that he learned that the violin, made of natural materials, changes its tone according to the temperature and humidity of the weather; some days the blue plastic bands were accurate guides, other days not. Then he learned that the same note has different shades, depending on the key in which it appears. Perhaps his most decisive experience in using these tapes was the month in which he found out how to create vibrato on a string. ... As he moved through each of these stages, hearing more, the plastic tape seemed an arbitrary answer, precluding the ear's discoveries. About a year after he began, he removed the plastic tape with which I once refused to "fix" the violin.

Such progress on the violin is what musicians call learning to listen with a third ear. It can be described more philosophically: the student learns there is a correlation between concreteness and uncertainty. In music concreteness means the student hears as if he or she were listening to another person playing; one's playing then becomes a tangible thing to be studied. Uncertainty means, in music, that the more the student can hear himself or herself in this way, the less satisfying musically are gestures that are at first easiest for the hand. My son, once he began to listen with a third ear, experimented with holding his left hand in odd postures that produce sour notes under some conditions and sweet notes under others; when he conducted these experiments on his left hand he was less concerned with problem-solving than with problematizing.

It was, as I say, as my secretarial self wandered over the relation of the concrete and the uncertain in music during those scrapings necessarily attendant upon executing "Twinkle, Twinkle Litle Star," that the graffiti of the subway appeared in my mind. The metal subway walls or the brick walls of buildings had no inherent character for those who sprayed them; these were planes to write over, whereas my son was learning to explore things for their own properties. But the exploration of his materials had a disturbing result. What made him engage even more concretely with them was uncertainty about how to draw sound out of a wooden box fitted with strings. This education was turning him outward, to judge his own expression, orienting his senses to results rather than intentions. It was an education in the "it," whereas the children making graffiti knew only the declarations of the "I." To speak of making things in an exposed condition...is to talk about creating uncertainty and possibility in a thing. An untaped violin makes, in Hickeringill's diction, discoveries to its player. And there is a virtue to making something as an exposed, uncertain "it" rather than a declarative "I": the violinist became more critical of the quality of the expression than the graffitist, for he could judge the sounds as things in themselves.

Our culture puts a great value on concreteness, at the expense of abstraction. ... The emphasis on making things concrete is a reflection of the value modern culture puts on objects—objects endowed with solidity and integrity. ... The uncertain seems to belong in the domain of insubstantial hesitation and tender-hearted, inward subjectivity. But toleration of uncertainty is as much a part of scientific investigation as of artistic creativity. A scientist who proceeds methodically from one self-evident fact to the next discovers nothing. ... Focusing on the concrete is satisfied by discoveries which reveal the unexpected and the problematic. It is in this sense that there is a correlation between concreteness and uncertainty.

Power enters into this correlation. The implication in a Miesian, sublime object is of domination by the maker over the eyes of those who passively appreciate his or her creations, whereas a more uncertain object should invite reciprocal intervention. Graffiti on a New York street reflects this power relationship: the walls of the "I" dominate others who had no choice in their making, who cannot participate in their form, who can only submit to them—though with no awe. The graffitist repeats over and over again his "I"...he confirms his sign. This "I" establishes an aggressive rather than an exploratory relation to the environment.

(pp. 207-209)

Mumford -- Art and Technics (ix)

"...this recognition of the human importance of technics was indeed one of the radical discoveries of modern times...[Bacon] proposed to honor inventors and scientists in the way that mankind had once honored statesmen, saints, philosophers, and religious prophets...[Marx] pointed out that the means by which a culture gained its living and mastered the physical and economic problems of existence altered profoundly its spiritual attitudes and purposes. ...The world had too long overlooked the significance of technical effort. To the old categories of the good, the true, and the [38] beautiful, modern man added an important factor that slave cultures had overlooked or degraded: the useful. That was a notable human advance." (37-38)

"Man's success in technics depended, however, upon two conditions. One of these was beneficial to the development of his personality, the other in some degree inimical to it. The great original contribution of technics was not merely to man's physical life, but to his sanity and general balance: it gave him a certain kind of respect for the nature of the materials and processes with which he worked, a sense of the painful fact that no amount of coaxing or cajoling, no repetition of spells or runes, no performance of sympathetic magic, could change a block of flint into an arrowhead or a knife. ...it was important for man's further development and maturity that he should [42] recognize that there are certain conditions of nature that can be mastered only if he approaches them with humility, indeed with self-effacement." (41-42)

[the second, "inimical" condition...] "Man's need for order and power turns him toward technics and the object, precisely as his need for playful activity, for autonomous creation, for significant expression, turns him to art and the symbol. But however important man's technical achievements are to his survival and development, we must not overlook the fact that they have, for the greater part of historic times, been achieved only at a painful sacrifice of his other functions. Except to meet pressing needs and interests, few men would devote themselves to a whole lifetime of mechanical work; indeed, those forms of work that are most effectively dehumanized--like mining--were for long treated as punishment, fit only for condemned criminals" (45-46)

So, the Technical in fact has a higher purpose beyond its material, earthly one. Albeit limited in scope, this purpose is nonetheless essential. For individuals and collectivities alike, Technics are an empirical pathway towards certain crucial developmental landmarks: towards "sanity and general balance;" towards "respect for the nature of the materials and processes" involved; towards the realization that "there are certain conditions of nature that can be mastered only if [the technician] approaches them with humility"; and, on the cosmic level, proof of "useful[ness]" as a universal value, not merely a contingent phenomenon. These are not the sentiments of a technophobe, but they do set rather narrow boundaries both for the role of Technics and for normative human development, ontogenetic and phylogenetic alike. Like any such narrow prescriptions they can be problematized on the grounds that they are not as universal as they purport to be. I confess that I for one would not be inclined to take that tack. This all describes quite well precisely what I feel I've learned from wrestling with various instruments, acoustic environments and bodily limitations. It doesn't (or it shouldn't) take a full-on natural disaster for us to learn to appreciate the power of nature; in fact colloquial reliance on disasters in their capacity as Lessons Learned points precisely to a loss of humility and understanding vis-a-vis nature, a devolution into primitive irrationality which is justified by the seeming irrationality of nature herself in bulldozing houses on one side of the street while leaving those on the other side untouched. No, if you're a wind or brass instrumentalist you can learn the same lesson less hazardously just by trying to play in tune in uncomfortably hot or cold climes. I will be thinking about this as I attempt to do so later today.

The Theory-Technique-Creativity Nexus

Editorial Note: I lied, and it was only good for half an exorcism. Therefore, the "frozen essay" is hereby defrosted, prepared, and served. Bon appetit.

-SK
•••••
A talented eighth grade tuba student of mine was asked by his band teacher two months into our lessons how things were going. When told we'd spent most of the prior lesson building and playing triads in various keys, this teacher's response, as later reported to me in an act of unsolicited pre-adolescent candor, was, "You can learn your chords and scales at home. What did he give you for technique?"

Remarks not initially intended for one's own ears certainly have a way of occasioning some instant reflection, but beyond that, this one soon had me thinking about writing those reflections down and sharing them with the greater musical community. While such a task necessarily entails rehashing much territory on which I have written and spoken before¹, the above exchange is an excellent prompt to further refine and sharpen these principles based on experience gained in the interim.

Specifically, I have set out here to theorize and advocate for the immense and far-reaching value of applying foundational music theory concepts directly to the student's band instrument regardless of their prior experience in applying them to the keyboard or to the written staff. Concurrently, I seek to connect what may seem to be mere subtleties of presentation therein to larger questions of what music education is, should be, and might become. Throughout, I take pains to address this discussion to all instrumental music students and educators, not just those involved in pre-professional musical training; indeed, I single out for particular scrutiny the notion that the comprehensive approach I describe is not well-suited to beginning and intermediate students. I would be remiss, however, to completely ignore the higher-order facets of this discussion and thus will conclude with some observations of that nature as well.


ISOLATION AND INTEGRATION
I strongly believe that tapping into the intellectual and creative dimensions of musicianship is a primary and essential task for music education even where instrumentalism is the ostensible priority of the endeavor. Indeed, instrumentalism is a fine priority to choose: music is after all not merely something to contemplate but something to do. That is to say that the most comprehensive and reliable extrinsic benefits following from a musical education of any scope stem from the "doing" part and minimally if at all from mere contemplation in absence of it. If you have ever read one of those breathless headlines declaring that music uses more different parts of the brain than most any other activity, I can assure you that the subjects of these studies were not merely head-bobbing or navel-gazing. Distanced scholarship does play a necessary role in "doing" music on a high level, but the two cannot simply be swapped out for each other one-to-one.

Hence, I want to propose that a broadening of the music-educational experience to encompass intellectual and creative pursuits need not come at the expense of instrumental concerns; rather, the intellectual and the creative can and must be essential components of the ways we present and cultivate instrumentalism, that is if we intend this cultivation to be successful. I believe as wholeheartedly in these assertions regarding beginning and intermediate students and hobbyists as I do vis-a-vis college music majors and working professionals. This is without question the most difficult aspect of my argument to support theoretically, but provided I can indeed achieve this, I intend to show as well that implementing it in practice is actually much simpler than it is typically made out to be. It is true that most classroom educators face severe practical limitations, but I believe this is an instance (a rare one, perhaps) where philosophical differences and not logistical barriers are in fact most responsible for creating a culture of expedience in place of the broader and somewhat more rigorous methods I propose.

Attaining a truly symbiotic relationship between the creative and technical dimensions of musicianship is, of course, a lifelong pursuit which even eminent musical minds struggle to meaningfully achieve and maintain. As such, it may at first blush seem too "advanced" a topic for the lower and middle grades. My contention, to the contrary, is that it is only as advanced a topic as is the material utilized to access it. All students are prepared to be creative within the confines of their ability, whether they know five notes or all of the notes. Further, it is well-known that the absence of social conditioning in young children makes childhood an intensely creative time; indeed, it is often easier to get third graders than eighth graders to improvise, and adults are typically the most difficult (that is, inhibited) age group in this way. Hence we may reasonably formulate an obverse statement as well: as adolescents start to feel the pull of myriad "adult" inhibitions imposed from without, it is doubly critical that we nurture their inner willingness and ability to experiment, to fail, to learn constructively from this, and to meaningfully understand that this process is essential to their development.

The time to challenge these students to be creative is not some imaginary day in the future that may never arrive. It is not the day when they can play all their scales two octaves from memory, the day they audition their way into the top group at school, or the day they finally decide to "get serious" about music; rather, that day is today, while we have them in front of us and have been charged with developing them as musicians, scholars, and citizens. We must teach the students that are in front of us, not the ones we project to exist at some unknowable time based on some unknowable set of variables.

The notion that my assertions here represent a textbook case of putting the cart before the horse is one which urgently needs to be challenged and debunked anywhere it surfaces. For one thing, the narrative of technique-as-prerequisite has its origins in an epoch of cultural consensus and musical common practice which has long since fragmented beyond repair. That is not to say this is a good reason to abandon teaching traditional instrumental technique in public schools, but it is ample reason not to assume that we know today the applications our students might later choose for their newly developed technique. Pedagogy which claims to be traditional and technique-oriented without sufficiently engaging students' intellects and creativity is, simply put, pedagogy that overreaches in its assumptions. This is because virtually any music that students might choose to play outside of the school band room will demand more than the passive recreation of written scores. It is very likely, rather, that it may involve the creation of scores and parts, aural transcription, co-composition, extemporization, or some combination of these things. As such, it behooves us as teachers to develop students' creative and aural skills concurrently with their general technique, as well as to ensure that the occasional need for isolation of underdeveloped skills does not work against the integration of these skills into the "big picture." This is not only possible within the confines of a technique-oriented program but in fact is a prerequisite to optimizing its results. There is no zero-sum game here, only a symbiosis which more closely mirrors the dynamics of living culture than any form of rote learning ever could. And to be clear, it does not necessarily entail abandoning the materials or values of the current paradigm, just rethinking how they are presented and in which proportions.

Speaking personally and anecdotally now, and at the risk of ruffling some feathers, I suspect that if a successful high-level professional playing career were a prerequisite to becoming a school band teacher, it would probably be unnecessary for me to make these points so forcefully, and perhaps also unnecessary to have written this paper at all. I am not an old or a wise man, but in my first decade of professional musical life, I have found the notion that technique deserves one's exclusive attention until mastery has been achieved to be mostly a convenient cover story for musicians and teachers who simply don't have much else to offer. It is so convenient, of course, because perfection is unachievable, and hence the carrot of technique can continue to be dangled in perpetuity, or at least until the student graduates or otherwise moves on to trouble some other teacher with their impatience. If I am wrong in this assessment, I must ask what the skeptic would posit in its place to explain why the concurrent development of technique, intellect, and creativity through mainstream classical music education could seem so radical when in fact there are established models for it scattered all across the past and present of Western cultural history? I have already addressed the logistics argument and found it compelling to a point but nonetheless inadequate by itself. Nor is the prerequisite narrative unique to the school band tradition: in fact it has been one of the enduring tropes of jazz curmudgeonry for nearly a century, reaching its apogee when dyed-in-the-wool beboppers reacted against the 1960s avant-garde by positing bebop as the unimpeachable technical and aesthetic foundation of all jazz to come. To be blunt, any musician who believes their music is everyone else's prerequisite is no musician at all, not in a free society at least. Their worldview as well as their work itself has run aground on delusions of common practice and cultural consensus which no longer define Western musical culture as they once did. I have for the most part privileged traditional technical approaches in my private teaching, partly out of personal predilection and partly out of terms of employment, but ultimately I see technique as a vehicle and not as an end unto itself. For some reason, this modern staple of music criticism and reception has not yet made it into many band rooms and private lesson studios in this country.

These are harsh words, and it is always with some trepidation that I release such words into the public sphere where people I've worked with personally might read them and be left wondering if they are to recognize themselves. On the other hand, in the wake of such a release it is unusual that I don't hear at least one unexpectedly positive response from someone I was most afraid of offending in this way. This could indicate that I have indeed underestimated the impact of logistics; that the "philosophical differences" I posited above are not as extreme as I think they are; and that we therefore are dealing with a lack of courage here and not necessarily with a lack of sensitivity. Ultimately I am betting against this explanation, but if I am wrong, I hope that what I've written, harsh though it may be, might then provide my colleagues with some of this much-needed courage.


SPECIALIZATION AND AGENCY
It will come as no surprise at this juncture that I question (as many have and will) the degree of agency afforded students by an exclusive focus on the passive recreation of written music created almost exclusively by career purveyors of educational publications. By the same token, I lament the rarity with which students in such classes interface with primary documents representing the work and ideas of acknowledged masters, a condition which is not and would never be tolerated in "core" subject classrooms beyond the elementary level. I question these things, and yet I am willing, for the moment, to accept them merely as inevitable consequences of collective cultural priorities and greater political expedience. If students are to be prepared to play Mozart by the time they are prepared to read Shakespeare, then their musicianship needs to be cultivated from the same early age and with the same tenacity as are their reading skills. Few would advocate for the necessity of this, even among the most vociferous of arts advocates. It must be said, however, that the alternative leaves music teachers to solve the puzzle of, quite literally, a child's mind in a young adult's body. Contemporary school music pedagogy is quite clearly a reaction to that unfortunate condition, but I do not think it is the only possible reaction.

Nor does the opposite extreme, the pre-professional "conservatory" orientation, necessarily play any better. Indeed, the notion of first isolating technique and only upon mastery of it being permitted to graduate to interpretive and creative work is itself a rationalist fiction stemming from two professionalistic dicta misapplied to the developing student:

(1) you must not reinforce your technical errors by repeating them without correction; if you do, you are "practicing your mistakes," not good technique;

and,

(2) all creativity is derivative, and fertile creativity requires lots of experience and influences; therefore, creating from minimal experiences and influences isn't worth much.

As a working professional I embrace both of these outlooks. I have to in order to stay employed and to fulfill myself as an artist. However, as a teacher of middle school and high school-aged students, I often impose in-lesson activities which virtually ensure students will make a few of the same technical mistakes several times in a row and/or that they will be charged with creating from insufficient musical experience. Why?

On the technical question, my thinking is that students who ultimately become aspiring professionals and/or college music majors will rack up hours of practice in that phase of their lives which ultimately will dwarf that of their early years. Meanwhile, those who remain strictly recreational players or quit after a short time will most obviously benefit more from a comprehensive approach now than from micromanagement of technical foundations they never end up building upon.

As for creativity as a lifelong pursuit, I hope all of my readers can easily agree that the journey and not the destination is of prime importance when it comes to the creativity of children and hobbyists, and that creativity, like success itself, is habitual. Expecting consistent masterpieces from any artist is of course totally unrealistic, but there are two other points we should consider in light of that. First, not every creation need be presented publicly. Great creators are often simply the most ruthless when it comes to deciding which of their creations are worthy of their good name, and this lesson in and of itself is one of great extrinsic value. Second, there are many elements of "craft" that can be taught and practiced even if the "art" part is destined to remain intractable. I am referring to the ability to realize a musical idea on an instrument or to write it down in proper notation; to knowledge of the notational conventions and instrumental ranges and transpositions that govern this latter task; to having heard and internalized enough music to the point that one's creations reflect these influences; to basic knowledge of computer programs for notation, recording, editing, processing, and programming; and so on. There is no reason to attempt to cover all of this ground, but covering none of it simply is not acceptable anymore, and waiting for just the right moment is nothing better than a gamble. Whether or not a given student possesses the inclination and capability to process this stimulation in the particular way that prolific composers and improvisors do is rather beside the point; if they are not at least given the opportunity to process it, then their chances of developing an emotional investment in music-making have not been optimized.

Is mastery of a traditional Western instrument in the traditional Western manner not the foundation on which all of these higher aspirations must be built? I am certainly not here to dispute the notion that it is, in fact, an excellent basis for this task and many more besides. Even so, we seem collectively inclined to underestimate the window for imparting instrumental mastery and, concurrently, to overestimate the window for sowing the seeds of creativity. If I could be permitted one more lapse into purely anecdotal reasoning, I would cash it in here, for I know of many more instrumental virtuosos who solidified their chops in their late teens and early twenties than I do high-level composers and improvisors whose interest and potential was not yet evident early in high school. That could be because technique is purely meritocratic and creativity is an ineffable gift from God, or it could be because of material circumstances more readily under our control. Given my reasoning here I suppose I must grant each reader the salience of their own anecdotes on the matter. My own observations lead me to think that it is never too early to take some modest baby steps down the path of creative development but that it certainly can be too late. Some light reading in the area of human psychology and brain development certainly indicates that the formative years are most fruitfully spent forging a diversity of neural pathways rather than specializing in just a few; that is, that creativity thrives on diversity of neural form and function and just as surely suffocates in the biocultural vacuum tube of specialization. It is one thing to parade around proclaiming music's function as neural cross-training in a politically calculated, reductionist manner, and quite another thing to actually embrace the many-sidedness of the musical experience and represent it in our pedagogy. I can think of no meaningful deterrents to the latter approach aside from the extra effort it requires on the part of those who by no fault of their own were not afforded a model of this orientation in their own educations.

Indeed, I have always insisted and want to do so once more that specialization itself broadly construed is an "advanced" musical topic, the one can that may be kicked down the road in precisely the manner I am insisting that creativity should not be. We must first possess a fair degree of inner certainty that we are choosing to specialize in something important to us before cutting bait with other closely-held interests and embarking on the hard work of consolidation. In other words, we are psychologically prepared to specialize only after we have attained agency, and agency cannot be achieved without protracted engagement in creative tasks. It has been said that you find out what you think about something by writing about it, and I believe this no less true in the realm of aesthetics than in the realm of scholarship.

If this sounds novel or overwrought, consider the place of the study of interpretation, a down-the-road, pre-professional place that comes long after most of what has been discussed here. Why do we study interpretation only then and there? Because it is a highly specialized topic the pursuit of which presupposes a single-minded surety that the chosen material is relevant to the student's long-term goals. General skills survive changes of interest and métier, specialized ones do not, and on top of that, the latter are harder won and thus require stronger internal motivation. This makes it particularly galling to find interpretation (mere interpretation!) being posited as the avenue by which music students might develop their creativity in band class in absence of being challenged to compose, improvise, or analyze. This represents a far more egregious example of putting the cart before the horse than any method I am advocating for.

So, what exactly is "agency" and where does it come from? It arises where ideas and experiences become transformed into beliefs and intentions; where these intentions start becoming increasingly specific and detailed; and where the question of what to do with oneself becomes engulfed by that of why. The whys of life are of course the most difficult, usually intractable questions we ever face. They are bigger than us, and certainly bigger than eighth grade band. They are not, however, like that trombone-toting bully launching spitballs from the back row: ignoring them will not simply make them go away.

Importantly, mastery of a given body of knowledge does not necessarily lead straightforwardly to the attainment of agency, nor does agency necessarily presuppose anything rising to the level of mastery. Pedagogies which prioritize one will, however, necessarily differ from those which prioritize the other. Unlike mastery, agency is something we can, should, and must expect to develop in young musicians whether or not they intend to pursue music professionally. I personally would go so far as to say that it should be our top priority. It is, in any case, one facet of music with implications far beyond the walls of the discipline, and hence no less crucial to the future hobbyist than to the future professional. Many extramusical factors both contribute to and are impacted by its emergence.

Taken collectively, the methodologies and hypotheses presented here represent a two-tiered plan of attack geared toward eliciting agency from the young student. First and foremost, they lay the early groundwork for dealing directly with the aforementioned primary documents (i.e. written scores and sound recordings) which contain students' rightful cultural inheritance. By the time students' "core" classes are leaving behind the shrink-wrapped, mass-marketed, one-size-fits-all consumables that the education-industrial complex dutifully cranks out to nurse them through their intellectual infancy, their musical infancy is, by that measure, just getting started and threatens to go on for a while. I think there is something fishy about that.

Similarly, a comprehensive music education from an early age may occasion the later introduction of academic musical topics truly comparable in intellectual rigor to the student's "core" classes, such as the science of sound, philosophical aesthetics, music production, and the study of criticism and reception history. This is rarely practical or even advisable except in exceptional instances, but I again ask the reader to consider the ever-escalating battlecry from within the arts advocacy world that music is a core subject, and then to consider whether any of their own pre-college musical education in fact rose to anything near this level. Core status is a worthy goal, but one which we are light years away from justifying on either the curricular or the pedagogical front.

I expect that while few school band directors would take substantive exception to these aspirations in the abstract, many will question the practicality of their meaningful implementation as well as their vague, generic, purely theoretical formulations. I can say that the vagueness, at least, is absolutely intentional here, even necessary, a direct consequence of my own belief in aesthetic plurality in arts education. That the specific demands of particular aesthetic orientations necessarily mediate the larger underlying assumptions of the accompanying musico-pedagogical framework goes without saying and is not particularly problematic. I have striven here, as elsewhere, to formulate these tenets in a manner that reflects the resonance I have found in my own journey toward agency among all of the music I am engaged with. It is a wider array of music than most of my professional colleagues, but not an infinite one; like anyone else, I am necessarily limited by the breadth of my own purview. It is true that some of my assumptions begin to break down when applied to the popular and folk traditions with which I am less engaged; meanwhile, experimental music, in which I have never had better than half a foot, eschews most of them completely and by design. Ironically, though, these particular genre labels also denote the Western musical traditions whose primary documents are most accessible. For that reason, the fact that even these documents, to say nothing of the scores of Beethoven and the recordings of Monk, have been crowded out of mainstream band culture by pieces with titles like S'cool Room Chromatricks is particularly inexcusable. Could a group of 7th grade, second-year band students not create a prose score, play-along track, or simple piece of musique concrète out of their chromatic scale exercises that was at least as interesting to listen to, and most likely more so? Would the process not be more worth their time in every way, and not least of all technically? And are there not three measly weeks of an ever-expanding school year that could be devoted to this without irreparably compromising students' instrumentalism?

Of course, the namechecking of all of these disparate styles, traditions, artists, and idioms, each so important to contemporary musical culture and each holding immense pedagogical promise in spite of their wildly divergent technical demands and cultural origins, raises yet another issue of practicality. It is indeed impossible to meaningfully expose every student to every important stream of Western music thought, and indeed it is hardly necessary or desirable either. Seeing, however, that the brain remains plastic into the third decade of life but indeed becomes far less plastic after that, it follows that students have longer than they are typically granted to decide whether or not to specialize, and also that they have less time than they are typically granted to achieve the agency necessary to both their musical and social development. The current paradigm manages to run afoul of both of these truths at once through its longstanding tunnel vision. In reality, there is plenty of useful space between hyper-specialization and overbroad dabbling that we might more profitably inhabit.

In Brain and Culture, Bruce Wexler remarks upon "a central feature of individual human development" that is as tantalizing as it is tragic:

Learning and action are in an inverse relationship throughout the life-span. We learn the most when we are unable to act. By the time we are able to act on the world, our ability to learn has dramatically diminished." (p. 143)

In this case, the vagueness and generality of the statement does not, I don't think, undermine its validity, and as such it strikes me as an unusually prescient and cautionary message to educators of all stripes. It is from this advice first and foremost that the pedagogical orientation I am advocating for here must be taken to proceed.


METHODS
While professional musicians, school music teachers, public-sector arts advocates, educational theorists of both the scholarly and armchair variety, and even standards-based learning models all pay lip service to the notion of developing students' creativity and self-expression through music education, the creative challenges encountered in the typical band room from middle school straight through graduate school remain, to put it kindly, limited and depersonalized ones. I suppose it is simply an unfortunate accident of history that the symphonic ensembles comprising the locus of so much Western musical thought and creativity have also institutionalized such a badly skewed teacher-to-student ratio as well as a top-down creative hierarchy from composer to conductor to performer. My fellow tuba players at least will recall the famous declaration by our pedagogical patron saint that "a limited challenge creates a limited musician." This of course rings just as true for questions of creativity and intellect as it does for those of technique and interpretation towards which Arnold Jacobs originally addressed them.

Just as the private studio has traditionally occasioned the introduction of greater technical challenges for young students, so it may also also fruitfully become the setting for posing greater creative, conceptual, and intellectual challenges; and this, I firmly believe, without subordinating one concern to the other in a zero-sum fashion. Meanwhile, as long as the greater musical community continues to view creativity as the intractable domain of a few innately gifted oddballs, its accompanying extrinsic benefits, which dwarf those of purely athletic music education, will remain mostly untapped. Not everyone is destined for creative brilliance, nor need they be, but anyone can learn something invaluable by making the effort. They should, and we must.

In what remains of this sprawling diatribe, I will begin to temper the vague theorizing, of which there has been plenty now, and initiate explicit discussion of methodology. Some of this methodology is supported by work I have done with students, and some of it is supported only by my own work and accomplishments. I must emphasize in any case that these methods and materials are for the most part so simple and familiar that they hardly bear mentioning, let alone scholarly excursus. It is precisely this triteness, though, that I feel too often leads the full implications of their ontology and provenance to be overlooked or misunderstood. Hence, the bulk of the discussion below deals not so much with the choice of material (which, befitting a creativity-centered pedagogical approach, is quite flexible) as with how it is presented, approached, worked through, built upon, and thought about.

In my opinion, musical patterning is the process which lays most bare for us the dialectical synthesis of technique and creativity hinted at in the title of this essay. It is undeniably the ideal intermediate step between rote execution and free extemporization. However, there is also an aesthetic nihilism inherent in the concept of patterning, a "paint-by-number" approach if you will, which strongly dictates that we must limit our exposure to it. You are what you hear: over time, listeners come to remember and ultimately to prefer that which they have heard most. Therefore, the ways we choose to develop our technique also shape our artistic identities. Any music pedagogy which does not account for the intrinsic qualities of its materials is an aesthetically nihilist pedagogy which thereby misrepresents both music's relationship to external society and its internal social dynamics.

This is not a question of musical style or genre: all artistic traditions produce works of seemingly "pure" inspiration as well as purely formulaic or reductionistic glosses on them. Ultimately this is a spectrum and not a dichotomy, but I believe it is incumbent upon educators that they be sensitive to the distinction anyhow. It seems to me, unfortunately, that very few are, that this is painfully obvious from both materials and results, and that the need for broad accessibility and expedience will continue to be trotted out as a defense anytime this issue is raised. The question then becomes what end, exactly, this accessibility and expedience is serving and whether it is worth the trouble at all.


RECLAIMING PATTERNING
Let's start with the good news about patterns: they repeat themselves on the intervalic level but change on the pitch level, and so the burden of creation is largely mitigated while the burden of realization remains largely intact. Verbal instructions such as "build a triad on each note of the scale" fully determine the notes to be played while underdetermining the means of executing them on the horn. The student is no longer a passive re-creator; he or she now has to think, at least nominally, about what is about happen. Such tasks are not truly "creative" processes; they are, rather, processes of translation from abstract idea to concrete sound. This is clearly a question of technique by any reasonable definition of the term, and as such, the choice of material and playing style can be geared to address almost any technical topic and the endeavor profitably undertaken by players of all abilities.

The lines-and-dots-oriented bandmaster is liable to opine once again that this approach is too applied and too integrative to be of use with younger students, who would most benefit from the isolation of underdeveloped skills. He or she might posit some glorious day in the future, as vaguely defined as it is overly optimistic, when Johnny or Susie has finally done the hard work necessary to be equally good (or bad) at every aspect of technique. Only once these students have sufficiently flagellated themselves at the altar of received knowledge have they earned the privilege of expressing themselves. Indeed, how can they express themselves if they don't know their scales?!

If you think this is just a straw man argument, I have news for you: this straw man has flesh-and-blood progeny and they release thousands of unlistenable jazz CDs each year. First of all, as I have already said, the day never comes when we have our technical houses ideally in order; this is, rather, a convenient fiction peddled by educators who never pursued such a consummation themselves. Secondly, realization exercises do not exactly work against the process of isolation; rather, they are the truest isolation of the improvisor's craft that exists. This can only be said, however, when students are asked to extrapolate a complete exercise from a single instruction. I hope it is obvious why simply writing the exercise out for them does not work the same way. If, on the other hand, it is the student who writes the whole thing out with due attention successfully paid to the myriad notational conventions involved, this is absolutely worth their time too, just for rather different reasons.

One of the wild cards here is that any material will eventually become memorized through repetition. Hence, a given pattern's value as a realization exercise gets "used up" long before its value as a technical exercise is exhausted, and usually before any particular technical challenges have been isolated on their own terms. Memorization is yet another useful challenge students may benefit from attempting, but again it is not at all the goal of any of this. Students may of course stick with certain material after they've memorized it and transition to the traditional mode of technical refinement; indeed, they must do this if they have aspirations beyond baseline mediocrity. Techniques do need to be isolated at some point, and material which is not "lived with" for sufficient period of time will not be internalized or retained. That being as it may, patterns are not the only material available to us, and they are not usually the material that we actually want to "live with" to this degree. As such, they are the ideal disposable materials for realization exercises but far from ideal as long-term vehicles for technical development; for the latter purpose, large chunks of "real" music are the only profitable choice. And to reiterate, "real" music does not mean "hard" music! It merely means music that was created out of an overwhelmingly aesthetic motivation rather than a reductionistic one.

Here is a canonical example of a "disposable" exercise:

As common and simple as this pattern might be, the difference between introducing it as notation and introducing it as a set of verbal instructions is not negligible. Even if permitted to look at a fingering chart or unidirectional chromatic scale during realization, young students still have some extra "figuring out" to do, and of precisely the kind that composers and improvisors engage in when they spin out their masterpieces. To be sure, what I have described so far does not exactly represent a creative act itself, and certainly not a masterpiece either, but it does represent the foundation on which such things might subsequently be built. It should go without saying, though, that there's absolutely no reason why the foundational technical objectives of this ubiquitous exercise cannot also be explicitly remarked upon by the teacher as the task of stand-and-deliver realization necessarily morphs into that of refinement and repeatability.

I hasten to clarify that I am not merely interested in tipping the scales away from written notation and toward aural transmission. What I am describing here, rather, does not truly belong squarely in either category; the central task of the process I have described so far is neither reading nor hearing, but rather thinking, as well as, albeit in a highly circumscribed manner, creating. I for one think we could use quite a bit more of both of those things at all levels of music education and have devoted the bulk of my pedagogical energy (and quite a lot of verbiage) to this end. So much of the early foundational material brass players are introduced to lends itself so well to the task that it almost seems wasteful not to milk every last drop out of it that we can. The past century of American creative instrumentalism attests to the artistic empowerment that a thoughtfully designed integrative approach can achieve, as does everything we know about the bygone ubiquity of improvisation in a European classical tradition which so many college and university music departments claim now to be conserving while conveniently ignoring this aspect of it.

As for the "practicing your mistakes" critique, it is true that technical mistakes are a frequent and inherent consequence of this methodology. Here we arrive at a highly contentious cultural disconnect between musical traditions which value technical refinement and those which permit technical abandon, one on which I fear partisans of each side may ultimately do no better than agreeing to disagree. I myself maintain a foot in several musical circles of each type and can personally attest to the vehemence and thoroughness of alienation that exists between the true believers of each camp. I can at least say that keeping myself happy is much simpler: it involves having concurrent, fulfilling opportunities to express myself in both refined and unrefined technical idioms. There is, of course, no reason to expect quite that much from middle school students who joined the band because their friends did; but then, in that case, there also is no reason to deprive our students of any approach which might more fully develop them as musicians and people simply on account of our own sympathies in one or the other aesthetic direction. That is why in absence of extenuating circumstances I customarily reserve lesson time each week for the presentation both of fully realized material AND creative/conceptual exercises. No student with whom I've been fortunate enough to work for a period of multiple years has failed to eventually achieve aesthetic agency and gravitate rather decisively towards one or the other stream, at which point I invariably attempt to introduce a more focused approach based on their expressed interests and needs, and to lead them on a journey of, if not refinement, then at least consolidation. For me, the task of eliciting such agency from students is no less essential a responsibility than ensuring that they play with proper posture and air flow. Of course this is above and beyond the established role of the private instrumental teacher, perhaps even outside of it in the views of some; but then, who else is there to pick up the slack that a 50:1 student-to-teacher ratio necessarily leaves dangling? Moreover, what good is technique without an emotional investment in its application?

As for that pesky issue of "pure" creativity and the generation of original material, I am not here to claim that it can truly be taught, but I do know that the ability to imitate is a foundational prerequisite that can be nurtured and diversified, namely by exposing the student to as wide a range of musical ideas as possible. Patterning is at once both the best friend and worst enemy of this process, an open-ended, technically and intellectually accessible simulation which is nonetheless a terribly inadequate substitute for exposure to aesthetic history and thought.

To address this deficiency in the process, students who are motivated and prepared to do so can and should "graduate" to greater challenges of realization based on more advanced music theory concepts, and also to transposition of material drawn from "real" pieces they know and love. To make the study of an instrument the locus of this expository-imitative process is not merely expedient in the sense of combining technical and conceptual pursuits into one; rather, this process is itself an essential component of instrumentalism. Any reader who finds that last statement to be an unduly jazz-centric one is again invited to consider the centrality of improvisation to so much 17th and 18th century European art music as well as the more recent propagation of myriad non-jazz improvisatory idioms. And again, I am not saying that every casual student of an instrument ought to be expected to achieve mastery at extemporization; what I am saying is that the non-improvising chamber musician is just as much the historical anomaly as the non-improvising lead trumpet player and that we truly need many fewer of both than we have.


TRANSPOSITION
If I have put forth more than a few seemingly-radical claims about young students, I trust even so that the confluence of the conceptual and the technical is quite a bit less controversial when it comes to aspiring and current professionals. The ability and willingness to transpose large chunks of pitch material is in fact an absolutely essential prerequisite to the refinement of professional-level technique and repertoire. I must be clear that, as opposed to "sight-transposition," I am referring to "mind-transposition;" in other words, to more or less the same "realization exercise" detailed above but utilizing more complex material and more of it.

The reasons for this are simple. First, to be ideally secure with passages in either extreme of register, the player must be secure in the same passage made yet more extreme; and yet if the only interval by which the player is comfortable transposing is an octave, this aspect of preparation is by definition completely unavailable to them. Additionally, in order to truly balance out our playing experience among all keys, we must in fact "practice keys;" that is, we must occasionally have periods where we play lots of material in the same key. (How's that for isolation of skills?) As anyone so inclined can attest, practicing keys is both less productive and less fun when we are limited to raiding IMSLP or our school's music library for centuries-old pieces we really don't care about. If we allow our weaknesses to force us down that road, we in fact miss a golden opportunity to consolidate our burgeoning agency and identity by revisiting music that is important to us and repurposing it. The exposure effect is a good thing as long as we are exposing ourselves to the music we love! The inevitable discovery of quite unexpected, purely technical resonances between familiar pieces and unfamiliar keys is also very constructive.

And so, remember all those technical "mistakes" the eighth grader made trying to figure out simple patterns based on verbal instructions? Remember how combining so many tasks into one worked so thoroughly against the sacred cow of isolation? Well, if it's not too harrowing a thought, let's imagine that he is now a Masters student in an exclusive university tuba studio. He has aspirations of winning a playing job and his practice log has grown to Gladwellian proportions, burying any memory traces of this youthful flailing underneath a heap of more positive technical reinforcement. All of those foundational patterns kept reappearing, though, in his music, in his undergraduate theory classes, and eventually in his own mind. Ditto the full gamut of scales, chords, and pitch sets. This material, all of it, has become so familiar, its technical challenges so inconsequential, and its intellectual demands so seemingly lightweight, that he will not waste one second or make one purely realization-based error when it comes time to practice Bydlo in A or The Ride in B-flat. Some of his classmates only discovered that approach late in college or even in graduate school, by which time their accumulated experience made a midstream change of orientation even more difficult. And so in the time it takes the trombone player two practice rooms down to hand copy the exposition of a Bordogni vocalise up a half-step, our man has warmed up his chops and brain alike by playing it in all twelve keys, low to high, without a hitch, and is on to something more pressing. He has an audition next week and is both training on a wider array of material AND making fewer mistakes in his daily practice than even some of his technically superior competitors; indeed, the ones he cannot outwork he has outsmarted. Nor is he losing sleep over the diagnostic exams for the DMA programs he is applying to: he has long since forged a permanent intellectual connection between his instrument and his academic music classes by immediately applying theory directly to the horn and eschewing the cult of pianism to read through passages of historically important scores part-by-part.

If he had waited for just the right moment to do all of this instead of simply seizing the moments he had, he would not have begun recognizing these same ideas in the music he was performing in band, orchestra, brass ensemble, chamber groups, and solo recitals. And because he was constantly performing with these and other groups, he did recognize them over and over, he internalized and retained the concepts quickly, he was never at risk of forgetting them as long as he was playing regularly, and he didn't have to waste face time refreshing his memory. Most importantly of all, he has not listened to himself practice dry scale exercises for many hours a day for many years; rather, he has listened to himself play a few scales here and there, dwarfed by a tremendous amount "real" music that he chose because he loves it. This means that whenever he composes or improvises, "real" music is what comes out, not the empty technical displays that lead so many listeners to misguidedly condemn technique as an artistically destructive force, thereby truly completing the circle of ignorance that the first published book of scale patterns started.

Anyone who thinks that last part sounds like it issues from the bitter memoirs of a broken down dabbler who loved playing but hated practicing thinks this solely out of fear. They fear breaking with the conventional wisdom that has always been there to comfort them, with the advice of so many teachers they respect and identify with, and with the faith instilled in them by these mentors that scales are The Way. They fear the loss of simplicity and comfort that reductive solutions have always provided and the ways this loss forces them to come to terms with the complexity, ruthlessness, and incomprehensibility of the real world. They fear last minute audition announcements which prescribe scales to be played, announcements which in reality only ever issue from academic music departments and high school music camps whose appetite for expedience and conformity is no less voracious than that of overburdened public school educators, who at least have a better excuse. They fear forgetting how to play their scales because they don't ever think about them unless they are actually playing them; they could have avoided this by taking a creative musician's approach to the horn rather than the trained-monkey approach, but they were spoon-fed the latter from tweendom and were never allowed, much less encouraged, to question it in any meaningful way. I am questioning it on their behalf, then, not out of hate as it may seem but out of love.

The graduate tuba student scenario above is dramatized and idealized, but only mildly. It is partly autobiographical too, but also validated by a great deal of subsequent real world experience. I for one find it hard to believe that eighth grade band is much more than a distant memory for most of us who have subsequently spent years or decades honing our instrumentalism under the tutelage of master teachers; I do know, however, that I have had many academic classmates and professional colleagues for whom the transposition of standard orchestral excepts, and sometimes even of simple tunes, is not so simple a proposition. Unfortunately, the twin conceits of "hire education" and an American meritocracy both fail us rather spectacularly here. If either of these things were real, would all those "master teachers" have so thoroughly neglected to develop their students along the lines I have enumerated? Considering that the vast majority of paying work for tuba players (i.e. teaching or entertaining) can be (and dare I say is) obtained as easily by novices as by experts, there effectively exists no material incentive for us to pursue the avenues I have laid out as thoroughly as I have laid them out. We can no longer expect, if we ever truly could, the material conditions under which we live to create this incentive on our behalf. Meanwhile, the individual initiative and altruism of the self-directed artist are beautiful things wherever they arise, but these are exceptional qualities and cannot be relied upon to initiate change on anything resembling a mass scale.

I more than enjoy receiving the occasional frantic phone call from a bandleader whose tuba substitute the night before could not read or improvise from a lead sheet; I also rely on those calls to keep coming in order to pay my rent. If more tubists could do this as well as they play orchestral excerpts, I would have to make up for the lost work some other way. Even so, as one of those altruistic, self-directed types, it is my greatest wish for any aspiring professionals reading this article, and current ones for that matter, that they might be motivated to stretch themselves out in the ways I elaborate here first and foremost out of a desire to do justice to whatever music is important to them, and only secondarily to be able to get playing work any way they can while waiting for the next orchestra or military band vacancy to be announced. Having said that, if the latter is indeed as decisive a step towards functional musicianship as the classical brass community is willing to take, then we should take it: anything to hasten the collective realization that a more creativity-centered approach is also a more technically rigorous approach.

Until then, I expect that technique-without-scales will remain a man-without-God question for many musicians and teachers, as I am reminded every time I attempt to broach this issue with those given to leisurely paddles down classical music's main stream. My reaction against this state of affairs is of course highly personal, but nothing I'm saying here is either radical or arcane. If it seems to be either of these things, this is merely symptomatic of the advanced stages of a period of pedagogical hyper-reductionism driven ultimately by forces far beyond the scope of this paper. I am occasionally given hope that much of what I've said here simply actualizes good intentions that already exist, certainly in the heads and hearts of many educators I've spoken with in person, and even in some otherwise counterproductive standards-based learning models. There can be no doubt, though, that it is a more challenging road for both students and educators than the various triangulated compromises that have come to predominate in its place. Failure is an essential part of learning, but today it is also grounds for depriving career educators of their livelihoods. In light of that and other such postmodern impasses, I'm inclined to own the "idealist" label here and admit that I'm asking a lot of my colleagues in various other metiérs. I can assure you, however, that you will always find me walking the walk, and no matter which side of the stand I happen to be on at the time.


NOTE
1. See my Operating in the Affirmative (entire) and MFA Graduation Recital Program Notes, pp. 24-33.

Activation

Today I listened, at his behest, to a very talented younger friend run down an upcoming classical trumpet audition. I have all but cut bait with the mainstream classical brass world at this point and found myself frequently prefacing/qualifying comments with, "What I'm about to say explains exactly why I don't do this anymore, but..." I am speaking specifically of questions of "expression," that ever-loaded, euphemistic catchall for everything that's not on the printed page. Everyone who has crawled under this particular rock for any period of time has spent countless hours in private lessons being told that a certain line needs more direction, that the speed, width, or amount of vibrato is not quite right, that all the notes and rhythms are there and all that is needed now is to "make music," as if that phrase means the same thing to everyone everywhere for all time. For my friend today, for me always, and I suspect for many, many other classical brass students, the challenge is simply caring, about what we are playing, about the people listening, and, highly problematically I would argue, about what kind of carrot is dangling at the end of the stick du jour. When the music is "our" music, and when the carrot is something real and personal and not simply career-driven grasping, it doesn't matter whether we're playing for thousands of people, one person, a microphone, or an empty room; but when the music is anything less than the very core of our identity, "expression" threatens to materialize only as a contrivance, if sometimes a convincing one, or perhaps not at all. This is a non-problem; it vanishes in "our" music as quickly as it appears elsewhere. But of course, even for the most uncompromising among us, the line between "our" music and the rest is not always so clear. For the moment Bach is my one lifeline to classical quasi-legitimacy, but I wouldn't refuse to play Hindemith, Kraft, or Galliard again, even though none of them are quite core identity material. I would be well-prepared technically simply because I would enjoy playing them, but in absence of an engaged audience I probably would need some prodding to "make music." And if this were all a teacher could think to offer me, I wouldn't be getting much out of my tuba lessons. Stylization is personal business, and it can scarcely be verbalized anyway.

Another can of worms, perhaps for another post: prescribed repertoire is essentially a means of controlling for personality. If competitors were allowed to choose their own rep, committees would have to judge on the aesthetics of the collective presentation instead of on (a) brute technique, and (b) the ability to play as if one cared deeply about (usually) awful music. We hear so much handwringing over (a), but I would insist that (b), being as it is highly destructive of sincerity, is actually the far greater evil.

Toward a New Isolation (iv)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter Break Stuff

I've long since abandoned learning tunes for the sake of learning tunes, but I still go out of my way two or three times a year to fill a hole in my knowledge of the standard jazz rep, as well as seeking out a few gnarly heads for their purely technical challenges. Whether in or out of school, this is often one of the only times of year when I can devote the time to see these processes through to completion, and so my mind almost habitually starts thinking that way.

This year's winter harvest? The standard "Darn That Dream" and Eric Dolphy's "Miss Ann" from the album Far Cry.



I live in/near LA now, there are jazzheads here, and this tune gets called. It's also a great tune that I should know by now. Like most tubists, I first heard it on Birth of the Cool, and for that reason its one of the few standards I come to with some of the lyrics burned into my memory. The hipness of the arrangement scared my teenage self away from trying to play it, though, and having already learned to thoroughly distrust the Real Book, I didn't take that chart seriously at the time. (Checking now, it's actually pretty close, but like almost every tune in the Real Book, there's one gratuitous, inexplicable slash chord in an odd place. Really, what would life be without all the gratuitous, inexplicable slash chords in the Real Book where plain old diatonic seventh chords would have sufficed?) Oddly enough, the last several standards I've made a study of have all been most commonly played in G: East of the Sun, Out of Nowhere, and now Darn That Dream. Interestingly, the first three chords of the latter two tunes are identical (Gmaj-Bbmin-Eb7), though on different durational scales; how many standards in Bb or Eb do you know that tonicize a key that far in the "flat" direction that soon? Similarly, thinking of, say, Groovin' High in Eb moving to A- D7 in that position, how many tunes in G or D do this in "sharp" direction? An interesting question for composers and players alike. Maybe writing in C isn't so much of a cop-out after all; by this logic, at least, you would be giving yourself the best chance to avoid being subconsciously influenced by what a distant modulation might entail.

And now for something completely different:



I LOVE this head and have wanted to play it ever since I heard it. The bugaboo, of course, is the range: it spans the entirety of the textbook alto range, which in sheer quantity is not unreasonable for most other horns, but the particular pitch level at which it lies is highly problematic. For tubists, the only viable "front line" solution would be to play it sounding down one octave, yielding a range from C# below the bass clef staff to A above it. A further octave displacement poses a wholly different technical challenge, but it is doable, and this is actually the range in which I plan to spend the most time. Because of the demands of front line playing (my exclusive interest as a jazz player for a long time), I am a much better improvisor up high than down low. This is also complicated by fingerings: in the highest ranges on brass instruments, one seldom needs bother with positions beyond the first four because the overtones are so close together. In the low range, though, you need all of them, bringing far more uncomfortable valve/slide positions into play, which is often the primary challenge in executing a passage. When I began pursuing bass functions in earnest, this was a tough lesson to learn, and one which I am still struggling with: fingerings and valve technique had been the "easy" part of playing since I memorized my elementary fingering chart in seventh grade, but with five of those suckers needed to play chromatically between the first two harmonics (which is still the "money" range if you play Eb or F tuba), boppish heads get challenging in a hurry. I've made progress; this will be another step if I can do it. One thing I've learned is that it's likely that at least one of the other 11 transpositions between these two extremes will sound and feel better than either of them do, and also that at least one will be nearly impossible, for whatever reason. It's good to know where those are.

Coltrane's Exercises and Excesses

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

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

The Problem with John Coltrane~~Part 2: Technique

Unlearning the Learned and Thoughts on Exercises...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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