Second Loves (iii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Loves (ii)

Hip-hop is the area of popular music (lower case, broadly construed) that has always piqued my interest disproportionately from all the others. Nailing down what exactly it is that I like about hip-hop and putting those impressions into words carries with it the same myriad pitfalls that accompany that task elsewhere in music, not the least of which is that the term "hip-hop" is general enough to include quite a bit of music I couldn't care less about. The best I can do, I think, is to say that I really like the "time feel" of certain rappers, and that when it serves the words particularly well, I like it even more. Most hip-hop songs, like most vocal jazz, classical art songs, and operas, fall well short of this exalted status, but very occasionally, I hear one that "works" on both levels, and it's threatening to become more than a passing fancy.

Yet I'm at a time in my life and career when even a dabbling side project in hip-hop doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Some colleagues would never speak to me again, others would just chuckle under their breath, and only if I'm lucky would a handful of sympathetic ones actually get my angle on it. But before the social consequences can even be considered, there's the more pressing issue of what to do about the music I've already devoted myself to, which is already an overcommitment and certainly doesn't need a mid-stream transition to a largely foreign style competing with it for time and attention. One solution is to skip the dirty work and simply launch into this new territory with little historical, technical or social perspective on it; everyone knows that's a recipe for disaster, though.

As I ruminate on whether or not to act on any of these impulses, here they are organized quite roughly into four musico-technical areas and given as something of a manifesto, a glimpse of what I might attempt in this realm if the stars were ever to align:

Part 1: Structure
Common-practice hip-hop leaves the most to be desired in the area of structure, and hence, this would seem to me to be where the most fertile ground for experimentation and innovation lies (and indeed, where the need for it is beyond pressing; it's looong overdue). In every hip-hop song I want to like but can't, there's a two bar drum loop to remind me that I'm listening to a commercially packaged product, music that needs to be "memorable" in order to be validated, and where through composition is a vice which merely "distracts" listeners from the all-important text. I see no reason why through-composed hip-hop is any less tenable than through-composed jazz of the kind that Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and others have made their names with, or for that matter, why the surface elements of a Kurt Elling vocalese couldn't serve as a model for what forward-thinking rappers might fill these new and exciting structures up with.

In other words, someone needs to do for hip-hop what Behold...The Arctopus has done for metal: combine the timbres and time-feels of a pop music style with classical-modernist approaches to tonality, structure and motivic development. Of course, the mainstream pop lemmings have branded Behold... as "the worst band in the world," and one can imagine the mainstream hip-hop crowd reacting similarly to what I'm imagining. This music would be doomed to the kind of narrow appeal that keeps Kyle Gann up at night, but I would stand by my argument that pursuing such directions is both more necessary and more ethically defensible than musical sycophancy.

I shouldn't speak in hypotheticals. I think it's highly unlikely that no one has tried this yet; it's more likely that I just don't know where to find them. (Anyone out there know?) Genre searches on sites like MySpace, CDBaby and eMusic are either not specific enough, or downright misleading. I googled "progressive hip hop" and learned that using *4-bar* drum loops, a few "live" instruments, and making passing references to politics is all it takes to be worthy of that label. No thanks.

Part 2: Materials
As with structure, it's essential that the progressive hip-hop I'm envisioning cast a far wider melodic, harmonic and rhythmic net than today's commercial hip-hop does. A mentor of mine in the jazz area has always been fond of saying that a rhythm section's comping should be interesting enough to listen to on its own without necessarily intruding on what the soloist is trying to do. I can't think of a better admonition in this discussion either, and I think anyone who remembers cassettes with the complete rap song on one side and just the beat on the other will agree that those B sides were a lot less fun to just sit around and listen to than they were to horse around with. Yes, I realize that this is part and parcel of what hip-hop is; I am more concerned, though, with what it might be able to become, which is a hell of a lot more than bashing people over the head with the same sample literally hundreds of times in the span of only a few minutes.

Part 3: Content
I'm sick and tired of reading about how modern classical music, jazz, improvised music, and whatever else the musical populists out there might decide to tar with the modernist brush if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, are irrelevant because they're too "self-referrential." CHEE-RIST, have any of you sycophants listened to hip-hop lately? If you do, you'll hear a music that literally refers to itself constantly, sung by people who simply cannot stop talking about themselves (and they don't have much to say, either). This is first order self-indulgent "fanservice" if I ever heard it, except the get-out-of-jail-free card otherwise known as the *backbeat* is redeemable for a free pass with any Cultural Studies major that might happen to hear it. So much for the words being more important than the music.

To their credit, at least hip-hop artists can be counted on to venture beyond "Ooh yeah, baby, I love you" with greater regularity than most any other vocal music tradition, popular or classical. Poetry as an art form typically does less than nothing for me, but even so, I'd have to rank the lyrical sophistication of hip-hop pretty high on the list of human cultural accomplishments. There are vast untapped possibilities, though, particularly in the realms of abstraction, nonsense, Dadaism, and scatting. Again, it's a matter of isolating particular elements of timbre and time-feel and importing them to other tonal and structural contexts. And on the rare occasion anyone comes up with a story worth telling to music, that's cool too. It had better be good, though, and if you're the main character, you better have accomplished something besides screwing or shooting somebody, because we've already heard that one a few hundred thousand times.

Part 4: Improvisation
One day about 5 years ago, pretty soon after I had graduated from college, I decided to indulge my curiosity by trying to teach myself to freestyle rap. The idea was as ridiculous then as it is now, but I felt like I had to try, if for no other reason than to gain an appreciation for people who can really do it. Along with hitting a golf ball straight and sight-reading Nick Zielinski's tunes, it's one of the hardest things I've attempted in my life, and predictably, I lost interest within a few weeks. There were a couple of moments of beginners luck, though, where, in the privacy of my car or my bedroom, I rattled off some pretty sick shit, and while I had no illusions that I'd be able to do it consistently without years of practice, there was something addictive about it, something I've never gotten over despite the fact that the sheer oppressive difficulty of it the other 99% of the time was more than enough to scare me away from making any kind of commitment to it. It was obvious that this commitment would preclude the commitments I'd already made to other musical endeavors, and while I've always been a bit restless, blowing everything up and starting over didn't seem all that prescient, especially for something which neither my inherited nor my acquired traits seem to suit me particularly well for.

Even so, I feel like my theory that one could reasonably expect to be able to approach freestyling much the same way instrumental jazz players approach their art is one worth hanging on to. The idea still intrigues me even though I didn't pursue it nearly far enough to be able to validate or refute it conclusively. I did get as far as identifying words whose final syllables were particularly tricky to rhyme and making lists of possible solutions. The harder work of transcribing other songs and perfecting the timing and delivery I didn't have the patience for, and would have been too embarrassed to be heard attempting had anyone walked in. So, I won't be the one to break down the barriers in this area myself, but if I ever meet someone else who can, I'll be champing at the bit to be their musical director.

People who would know better than I do have told me that most rappers can't actually freestyle, and that 99.9% of everything we hear from them is preconceived. That doesn't surprise me if it's true, but I do find it very disappointing. I'd posit that just as listening to Supersax performing a transcribed Charlie Parker solo or a dixieland band playing from a published arrangement are poor substitutes for the real thing, preconceived rapping, while some of it is good, merely scratches the surface of what is musically possible for the genre. The half-assedness of my experiment notwithstanding, I'm willing to bet that by applying some tried-and-true principles from the teaching of other improvisational arts, one could bring about greater overall fluency in freestyle rap, though undoubtedly it would come with the same drawbacks that have surfaced in formalized jazz education (and indeed, they're already giving degrees in Hip-Hop Studies, so we're likely to start experiencing these drawbacks sometime soon if we haven't already).

Second Loves (i)

In college, I attended a masterclass by a very talented and increasingly well-known trumpet player not much older than I am now who had been a jazz major at a prominent U.S. conservatory, and who uttered something that will be with me forever: "When I finished college, I realized that I didn't really like jazz." Indeed, it could justifiably be called into question whether the music that was performed during this residency qualified as "Jazz" with a capital-J, yet this music was, besides being incredible, nevertheless inconceivable without its basis in jazz-conservatory training (not to mention being exceptionally fresh, and miraculously so, I guess, given that such training is often assailed for its potential to educate the individuality right out of its students).

This was an odd pose he was striking, disavowing jazz one moment while displaying an unabashed indebtedness to it the next (he might contend the accuracy of the latter description, but it was hard not to hear it that way, and this not in spite of how he prefaced his work but in fact most especially because of it). It's a pose that doesn't resonate with me any more today than it did back then, but having since navigated the post-college twenty-something years myself, I can at least say that I better understand the dynamics at play. I was barely 21 years old at the time of that masterclass, but my honeymoon period with bebop had already evaporated, leaving me bouncing between intense periods of study borne of fanatical devotion and despondent periods of non-study following an event or series of events which brought home to me just how stylistically limited an improvisor I had chosen to become. In the meantime, I was already noticing that while there were tons of other college-aged jazz players, tons of middle-aged jazz players, and more than a few senior citizen jazz players, I didn't ever seem to meet very many twenty-something jazz players. I only knew a few musicians who were 5 to 10 years older than I was, and like this clinician, most of them seemed to be after something eclectic which may or may not have entailed an overt jazz influence. Among this group, most were at peace with their past jazz study, but it wasn't unheard of to meet one who had disavowed it altogether as an adolescent phase. This wasn't a novel concept to me at this point; I just wasn't prepared to encounter it in the form a high-profile professional giving a university masterclass.

I'm now approaching the age this clinician was when those words were spoken, and a lot still has to change if I am ever to decide that I "don't really like jazz." Nonetheless, I say that his statement will be with me forever because it was the moment I realized that it's not just broken-down jazz-wannabe punk rock stoners with outsized inferiority complexes that say these kinds of things; they have, do, and will, but it can be soft-spoken, well-educated, profoundly gifted musicians as well, musicians who make music I would actually want to listen to, whether it's jazz or not, and who I might on a good day even be able to tolerate socializing with. That was something of a revelation, both for better and for worse.

Though I haven't disavowed jazz (or most any other music I've ever been smitten with for that matter), I have, in fact, gradually begun acquiring interests from outside classical music and jazz, interests which may be tremendously dissimilar to these styles on the surface, but which invariably contain deeper similarities. And having now more or less arrived at the dreaded age in question myself, I'm no longer limited to observing snapshots, but now have also witnessed trajectories, the before, during and after of it, as well as the litany of extra-musical priorities peculiar to this age that can, in some cases at least, drive the musical ones over a cliff.

I've frequently remarked to others that this is an age where musicians go one of two directions (leaving aside for a moment the dreaded third direction of quitting altogether), namely towards either lifelong learning or a lifetime of stagnation. By far the most insidious enabler of apathy is the incredible tolerance (enforcement?) of mediocrity that prevails at just about every turn among so-called professionals. A young freelancer can't help but notice how much lower the musical bar is at "money gigs" compared to even a second-rate college music department. Another is the frantic twenty-something race to petite bourgeousie domestic respectability, pitting canoe ownership against studio rental and wine tasting against score study in the high-stakes court of spousal approval.

Among those twenty-something musicians who, for whatever reason, continue to seek growth, a certain expansion of purview is almost inevitable. Yet a severe disconnect continues to exist between myself and many of those around me by virtue of the fact that, whereas I started with classical music and jazz and have been working my way out from there, most of them worked their ways to classical music and jazz from somewhere else. I say "continues to exist" because this was the source of even greater frustration when I was in high school and college. I used to entertain myself at jazz camps by picking out the students who came to jazz through rock just by hearing them (though hearing them was, of course, often superfluous as they usually were dressed for the occasion). Any given jazz jam I might have found myself at during those years seemed to follow roughly the same trajectory: a series of awkwardly played (sometimes awkwardly called) standards would prevail until some ballsy kid in a Green Day shirt had the guile to call "Chameleon," to which "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" was the inevitable chaser, and suddenly everyone except for the faculty and I was having the time of their lives. Some of the people I work with now have seen me refuse to play "Chameleon." It's not so much that I dislike the music as that its symbolic status as the pivot tune in the jazz-rock cold war that defined my musical youth has more or less spoiled it for me for all time. (I have performed "Red Clay," though, because if you really want to be a dick, you can always insist on playing it in the original key.)

Suffice it to say, then, that when disavowal time rolled around, circa age 24, there were some surprises among my peers, but not many. There's selling out, and then are those who never had anything for sale in the first place. Once whatever social factor it was that compelled all those high school punk rockers to go to jazz camp every summer had evaporated, they gave up trying to infiltrate the jazz world for status' sake and went back to being who they really were (which I don't begrudge them one bit because it's better for all concerned in the long run). This is most definitely not the route that our mystery clinician took; I imagine he falls firmly into the group that simply continued discovering non-jazz music he liked rather than that which divests itself of all things uncool at the drop of a hat. It should be obvious to anyone who keeps up with these missives that I'm a jazzhead at heart, but recent years have presented (if not manifested) the possibility of going eclectic in ways I never anticipated. That this has been brought about by exposure to what is, in the grand scheme of things, an exceedingly tiny fraction of the non-jazz, non-classical music that's out there only adds to my suspicion that a more eclectic route is inevitable.

Sounds simple, but it's not. For one thing, there's a fine line between studied eclecticism and merely indulging a short attention span, this being the difference between true synthesis and mere reference or allusion. For another, there's the issue of authenticity, or bringing one's depth of knowledge of and experience in newfound musical interests up to speed with lifelong ones. Finally, much as it pains me to say it, there's the social aspect of all of this, and the reality that whether one's change of stylistic direction is studied or unstudied, unified or fragmented, authentic or allusive, sincere or calculated, assumptions will be made based on limited evidence, and otherwise sympathetic peers on both sides of the divide will think to themselves either, "He's no longer one of us," or "He'll never really be one of us." Even to someone like me, that can be a more powerful deterrent than the specter of taking time away from prior musical engagements, though the latter also poses an interesting conundrum.

Success, Of A Sort

Given a project rife with contradictions, it's fitting that this edition of it has both affirmed and negated the well-worn saying about third efforts. With today's posting, I have for the first time succeeded in posting at least once daily for an entire month, as well as set a new personal record for posts in a month with 32. Nonetheless, this has been by far the least satisfying of the first three iterations of Blog Month. That comments have remained scarce is, of course, always a disappointment, but there's more to it than that this time.

Last year, while I started slowly, by the end of the month, I couldn't wait to get home to write. I had almost enough to say and enough time to polish it to be able to justify posting daily under the standards I try to hold myself to the rest of the year. Whatever I was reading, playing and experiencing elsewhere during that time must have been unusually inspiring or thought-provoking. I've felt inspired this month for a variety of reasons, but I've also been awfully busy. I knew that there was to be no slow month this fall, and so I tried to pick the most conducive one, but it was bound to be less than ideal either way. I frequently made room for this most trivial of projects by tabling other more vital ones in hopes that a relapse of last year's bout of inspiration might justify doing so. For the most part, it wasn't to be, and there were several days this month where I struggled to come up with something, anything to post. Notably, though, there were no days where I simply forgot to post, which is one improvement over last year. I think that bodes well for future projects, and I plan on continuing with them. But only once a year. At the most.

Per tradition, the entire opus will remain on the front page for the next several weeks. Savor it slowly, or all at once, but don't expect more of this type of material until next fall.

Recommended For You
Q-Tip– Kamaal The Abstract

Listeners Also Bought
Witold Lutoslawski– Orchestral Music
Albert Ayler– Spiritual Unity
Behold The Arcotpus– Skullgrid
Charles Ives– Concord Sonata

The Network

Readers could be forgiven for detecting a contradiction between something I wrote yesterday and a previous post on social networking and music, so I thought I'd offer a clarification. When I "tour" MySpace these days, I'm looking for networks of music, not networks of people. It's great to be able to play the age-old game of working your way out from music you already know and love by checking out those musicians' other projects. That's initially how I went about building my CD collection, and it's equally effective (not to mention free) in the context of MySpace. There is, in fact, a certain amount of professional obligation at play here, but I consider that aspect of it to be subservient to my curiosity as a listener and a general desire to discover new music.

What led me in a previous post to trash social networking in the context of music distribution is the idea of discovering new music through one's friends. At least that's how many sites have phrased it; I'd call it herd mentality. I suspect that this idea of social music discovery is one way these sites seek to deal with the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of a vastly oversaturated music scene. I for one enjoy the hunt, though, and don't find it as intimidating as some might; again, if you can manage to stumble on just one band you like, suddenly you have a thread, and you might never exhaust it. Daunting as this is in some ways, I find the idea of being spoon-fed my musical diet by some invisible hand to be the least palatable of all the options.

Wolpe's Symphony

With all the talk about digital music services around here lately, it's important to remember that YouTube remains an incredible resource for musicians despite the legal and ethical gray areas it operates in. I for one like to balance my legal acquisition of in-print compact discs and MP3 files with periodic tours of YouTube and MySpace, and I usually come away with a new name or sound that piques my interest. I recently searched for the composer Stefan Wolpe on YouTube and discovered his Symphony of 1956, which has since come to fascinate me, this despite my later discovery of its low standing even among Wolpe fans.

Let's start with some background from the Stefan Wolpe society:

During the 1950s...Wolpe was seeking a way through classical twelve-tone and developing variation into a new constellatory form. While director of music at Black Mountain College (1952-6), Wolpe had the time and the seclusion to compose a series of scores that mark the high point of abstract expressionism: Enactments for Three Pianos (1953), Piece for Oboe, Cello, Percussion, and Piano (1955), and his Symphony (1956). In these works he said that he aimed for "a very mobile polyphony in which the partials of the sound behave like river currents and a greater orbit-spreadout is guaranteed to the sound, a greater circulatory agility (a greater momentum too)." Rather than a single center of attention, he sought to create multiple centers, "to give the sound a wealth of focal points with numerous different directory tendencies." To obtain a more open sound he further fragmented and superimposed derivatives of the shapes: "To keep the sound open, that openness which leads me to think in layers (like the cubists), often I use canonic (or double canonic) foldings to keep the sound as porous as possible. I use then all possible techniques of inversions, retrogrades, like attacking an object from all sides, or moving out from all sides of an object."

If such lofty pre-compositional scheming would seem to doom such a piece from the start, think again. To my ears, any of these metaphorical allusions to "river currents," "orbit-spreadout," "circulatory agility," "multiple centers," "a wealth of focal points," "layers," "foldings," and "attacking an object from all sides," is as good as any other in describing what I find so great about his Symphony. (I just wish I spoke German so I could comprehend the true meaning of whatever untranslatable term got translated as "orbit-spreadout." The translation might find its way into my vocabulary nonetheless; it's just that good on its own.) The propulsive energy of this piece approaches an improvised quality, yet with audible unity in pitch selection and manipulation that one would be hard-pressed to improvise.

In digging around for information about Wolpe, I eventually stumbled on a peculiar recollection from Elliott Carter:

His music is terribly uneven, but some of it is remarkable. What it always has is one thing you like to have in music, and that is a kind of personal enthusiasm. It's always very lively, you feel it's always in touch with life. It isn't routine. It's unexpected in many ways. There are all sorts of different kinds of things that he tries to integrate into one thing, which sometimes don't go together so well in one piece, but in others they do. The whole question of the relation of the diatonic to twelve-tone or chromaticism, the combination of those is something he fought with. Sometimes he solved it, and sometimes he didn't, as in the Symphony. It seems to me to be extremely odd that a man as experienced as he should have written a piece that is so difficult for the orchestra that it is nearly impossible to get a good performance. It may have been as a result of his contact with musicians in Europe, since he went to Darmstadt in its early days, when composers were writing very advanced and very difficult pieces.

Uh, hello? Elliott Carter talking shit about someone else's "very advanced and very difficult" piece of which "it is nearly impossible to get a good performance"? Something stinks here. I think the "relation of the diatonic to twelve-tone" is a somewhat more valid criticism, but I think he overstates it. Forgive the idealism, but I dream of a day when there is no longer a simple dichotomy between tonality and atonality, consonance and dissonance, tension and release, or whatever. Modern musicians have been working toward this for over a century and it has not yet come to fruition, but I hold out hope. More importantly, though, the converted can always decide to go along ahead of the lemmings and proceed this way ourselves as best we can. It's difficult and not totally attainable given the world we live in, but we can try. And I'm not saying I had to try to like Wolpe's Symphony, because I didn't; I loved it the first time I heard it. But, there certainly are moments here (isolated ones, really) that threaten to sound incongruous to the rest of the piece by virtue of lending themselves to a tonal hearing. I can hear them that way, but I can also hear them as inevitable manifestations of the inner logic of the piece, and to me, that trumps everything. Our conditioning really can get in the way of enjoying this kind of music, especially if it has been very traditional or conservative. Just do me a favor and try not to be like that, okay?

Kyle Gann is an avowed Wolpe fan and Carter detractor who has nonetheless opined that, "Wolpe's Symphony is one of his weakest works." Here are two eminent musical thinkers whose work and ideas are at odds in most every respect except for their interest in Wolpe, and they're both unimpressed by the Symphony. I beg to differ, but thanks to the YouToobz, you can make your mind up for yourself. I've embedded the entire piece below. No one's ever accused me of being an audiophile, and I actually tremendously enjoy the various imperfections of this rendition, from the slightly scratchy sound quality to the obvious struggles of some of the players to execute exceedingly difficult passages. Whereas Carter complains that it's almost impossible to get a good performance of this piece, I have to wonder if it isn't the mark of a truly great piece that it can tolerate a certain amount of abuse. In any case, I'm imagining what a cleaner rendition would sound like and I'm not at all sure I'd prefer it.

If you navigate to the actual YouTube page for each of these videos, you'll find that, predictably, the number of views declines as you progress through the movements. Too bad; the piece gets better as it goes along. Of course, I expect everyone to listen to all four or you're not allowed to read my blog anymore.

Other Aspects of the Art

In my rush to keep the dream alive, I omitted two important considerations from yesterday's discussion. The first is spontaneity. These pieces are essentially improvisations, albeit within severe enough constraints that the variations among them are of the subtle variety. Even so, this is an important parallel with my musical endeavors. I sense similar faculties at work and similar sensations present during the creation of these pieces as I do while improvising musically, and both acts take more out of me mentally than they do physically. That the sketches would take anything out of me is odd, since they only take about 20 minutes to make, but the "endgame" so to speak is always a bit suspenseful, and I sometimes even feel the slightest bit nervous as it approaches. I don't stop, though; working from start to finish without the opportunity for revision is an important part of the process. Perhaps I should start calling them "improvisations." I do hate titles, though.

As you could have guessed from the above points, the second consideration is temporality. While ultimately I intend the completed works to be observed statically, I think it would be interesting to "perform" them. There would have to be some technology involved, but it could be done: you would need some kind of touch screen beneath the paper to detect the sketches as they're made, and a projector to bring the show to an audience. A "virtuoso" could sketch with both hands at once, beginning the pattern at opposite ends of the paper and moving toward the center. I imagine that the idea of an audience sitting silently in a room watching a monitor would meet the same criticism that abstract symphonic music meets these days; I would say the same thing in response.

I Write Draw for Myself

The art I posted yesterday is the fourth such piece I've created. It's a bit juvenile, and that's part of the point. When I was a kid, this was the form that my doodles always seemed inclined to take, a series of straight (or almost straight) lines connected (or not) to infinity. I detested music as a child, but was very interested in drawing. Representational drawing defied my abilities, however, this despite a near fixation on the subject for a time, and a few separate attempts at seeking formal instruction. Had I the slightest inclination towards abstraction at that young age, I may have spent my life creating these monochrome sketches rather than composing music, but for better or worse, like most young kids, my interest in the arts was always driven in some way or another by the entertainment industry, and as we all know, abstraction doesn't sell.

To be sure, I'm worse than a dilettante when it comes to visual art, but that's also part of the reason I thought it might be worth sitting down to draw again. With so much handwringing, here and everywhere else, about the differences between initiates and non-initiates when it comes to modern music, I started to wonder if this might not be a good way to more truly put myself in the shoes of a naive musician. Additionally, when I started considering the implications that much of my musical philosophy might have in the visual realm, I realized that this silly childhood scribbling actually reflects that quite well. I had "found my voice," so to speak, as an artist long before I would as a musician, probably because the technical demands of my musical voice are enormous compared to the minimal ones required by the art I posted yesterday. This mystifies me a bit, though. While a high degree of abstraction and a minimum of discernible sequences or patterns are indeed two features I value highly in a piece of music, there are other facets of my art that are severely at odds with my musical value system, the most obvious being the severe economy of means.

Musical minimalism greatly intrigues me conceptually and philosophically, but as a listener, I generally don't care much for the results. Conversely, I remember encountering Donald Judd's concrete work as a teen and being fascinated by it without having a clue why. I still am, and I still don't know why; it's tempting to conclude, as many would, that this is a predictable case of training influencing reception, but I think if you presented me with the Ferneyhough of visual art, I'd probably like that too. (Actually, that sounds awesome; anyone know who that might be?) I'm also a stylistically restless musician, whereas I can't imagine being comfortable working in any visual medium other than these sketches. That conflict intrigues me as well.

I hope to use these works as cover art on some future releases, and may post some more here. However, I've seen too many faux-musicians trying to pass off their own juvenilia as some kind of earth-shattering aesthetic triumph, and I certainly don't want to come off that way. Let's just say that I write draw for myself, not as a gesture of contempt, but one of respect.

Art

Album Only

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

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

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

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

Digital Music and the Greater Lemming Community

When it comes to digital music services, there's a pet peeve of mine that even Lala could stand to be scolded for: the social networking component. If there's any value whatsoever in keeping apprised of what everyone else is listening to, it's to be able to avoid listening to it yourself. One can certainly use the information that way, but I suspect that's not how it was intended to work:

eMusic is about the love of music. Based on your listening preferences we take you to great new music as well as tell the story behind the classics. We unearth forgotten gems, make connections that lead you to new music and make the music you already love a little richer. Call it a curated approach. eMusic is perfect for people who love music but don't have 20 hours a week to stay on top of what's going on. We make sense of it all so you can find and enjoy the music you love.

It takes a hell of a lot more than 20 hours a week folks. Get over it. No one can truly "keep up" anymore, including you. Keeping up isn't the point anyway, unless you already know everything about all the music that was made before you were born. This conceit of a third party distilling the cumulative musical ferment of society down to the "right" two albums a month is not only impractical, but a little scary. I don't care how "indie" you are, if you're in business, I don't trust you to do a better job digging up new music than I can, and I certainly don't need a profile page so that the other lemmings can cop my shit.

Even being something of a modernist curmudgeon, I still tend to end up with an assortment of music in my collection that defies collaborative filtering as it is currently constituted, or at least it would seem this way since the "people who bought this also bought..." lists never seem to contain anything I would touch with a virtual ten foot pole. Based on the generally more eclectic tastes of most of my acquaintances, I have to think that it's probably even worse for them. So while I can't avoid unwittingly contributing to the lists that pop up on other people's screens, I won't be filling out my emusic profile and I won't be viewing anybody else's. If you really care what me, myself and I are listening to, you'll have to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscription

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

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

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

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

Teaching Docket

This month and next, I am and will be teaching more than I ever have before for any significant stretch of time. But what's more remarkable, to me at least, about the present slate is its diversity. It had been a couple of years since a trombone student had signed up to study with me, but I've picked up 3 of them since the beginning of the month; my Jazz History and Listening Class at the West Bank School of Music has populated for only the second time since we began offering it; our director at WBSM wrote and received a sizable grant earlier this year to allow us to offer a series of 5-week workshops, and Milo Fine and I are leading one on Improvised Music; and two of my longer-term tuba students are auditioning to be music majors next year, the first two from my studio to have the inclination.

Rather than bogging me down, all of this sudden activity has me enjoying teaching like never before. It's rare that I've been able to be active as an educator in all of the areas in which I'm active as a performer and composer, and not surprisingly, as with those other endeavors, I'm much happier that way. It's also, of course, easier on the wallet to be teaching more. Much ink has been spilled lamenting cases where musicians were forced to teach to make a living, but I've never felt that way myself; I see at least a minimal amount of teaching as an obligation to feed the other side of the pipeline, and have a genuine desire to share what I've learned with students.

If anything, I find it unfortunate that I derive most of my income from teaching not because it gets in the way of my other pursuits, but because I'd rather not have to charge for it. In a perfect world, I would teach a handful of students, free of charge, and with high expectations (both achievement and attendance) that would have to be met in order to continue the relationship. I would just as soon teach raw beginners as aspiring pros assuming they show up every week and put the time in to make steady progress. Until that day, though, what I'm doing now through the end of the year is just about the next best thing. Variety is the spice of life.

Make-Up Calls

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

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

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

Prescriptions

I've always been of a mind that prescribing repertoire for competitions, grad school auditions and other such circumstances is short sighted. One's choice of repertoire says a little bit about their technique, but a lot about their musicianship. Committees aren't ignorant of this, but rather keenly aware of it; direct comparison of players' execution of the same set of tasks is to be favored because it enables the imposition of more objective criteria in a way that isn't possible when everyone is playing different music. Personally, I don't think that's a good thing. Any conceit of objectivity in a music competition is a mirage anyway; I'd rather everyone heeded the total musical package, whatever that is to them. I know that if I ever found myself sitting on a committee where I was asked to assimilate someone else's value system, I'd certainly want to know why I was invited in the first place.

When it comes to instruments like the tuba, I wonder if committees aren't more apt to prescribe repertoire simply because there is so little of it to choose from. A tubist-composer or -arranger who creates even a merely serviceable new piece for themselves to play has stacked the deck substantially in their own favor (you'll gather from that statement that I personally consider most all of the usual suspects to be less than serviceable, if not as showcases, then as music, which is more important). On the other hand, one wonders if mediocre music is ever prescribed precisely in order to see who can make the best of it. If personalization is the goal, though, better to let everyone choose (or even create) their own music in the first place.

Revision as Conformity

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

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

Compression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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