Toward a New Isolation (v)

The blessing and the curse alike of improvisation is that what goes in tends to be what comes out. I would define improvisational technique as the degree to which one is able to control "what comes out," not only through real-time decision making but also through the suspended-time working out of ideas and weighting of exposure (i.e. "what goes in"). The relationship between the preparation and the performance is muddier than with physical playing technique, and there's no "reinforcement" of good habits to which one slowly acclimates and eventually ceases to be conscious of; the only "good" habit is the one you can turn on and off at will. Even so, there absolutely are purely conceptual ways that improvisors can purposefully enable certain possibilities and disable others based on their aesthetic, and I would argue for understanding this process as a technique of sorts, albeit one dealing more with probabilities than assurances.

This is the main reason I haven't earnestly practiced scales or scale patterns since high school: I think they sound terrible as part of an actual performance. That almost no one seems to disagree with this value judgement and yet almost everyone overuses these patterns in precisely the way we all seem to agree they are the least useful leaves me to conclude that we simply are not in sufficient control of ourselves these days to meet our own standards. There are literally endless licks, etudes, vocalises, excerpts, saxophone solos, Bach movements, guitar riffs, and on and on that are available to us should we need to address the purely technical challenges posed by scales, and so there's simply no excuse for spending so much time with something you loathe that you're literally helpless to prevent yourself from playing it in the middle of an improvisation (in other words, precisely the way a sizable majority of our contemporary musical polity seems, by their own definition, to be).

I think it is crucial to understand the process of choosing and weighting these influences as a matter of technique in the sense that one's degree of control can be quantified, if not only in one's own mind: the same way I might choose how long to spend on long tones or lip slurs each day based on a dynamic understanding of my current conditioning needs, I might choose to invest heavily in blues-based material or avoid Charlie Parker licks if I feel that my frame of mind and upcoming obligations demand one or the other. In other words, intent becomes a yardstick against which outcomes are measured. The difference, then, in aesthetic between this kind of improvised music and pre-composed music is slight, and the reason for choosing improvisation over composition becomes less about "freedom" per se than it does about achieving (more like enforcing) a certain frame of creative mind driven by the urgency of real time, ostensibly because one deems the potential results to be (a) somehow perceptibly different from the alternative, and (b) worth the trouble.

Of course, the less specific the intent, the cloudier the issues of improvisational technique become. I've certainly enjoyed listening to much improvised music which I have to assume springs from a less overwrought conception of improvisation, and will even give myself over to working this way for the sake of a colleague's project; it is not, however, my default setting. The improvised music world is rightfully infamous for its practicioners' specious disavowals of having been governed by anything in particular, including their own tastes (so much for "just playing for themselves," huh?), often a not-so-innocent maneuver aimed at escaping responsibility for poorly prepared and executed performances by claiming that criticism to this effect somehow misinterprets their music. Such is the birthright, I suppose, of the "non-idiomatic" schools to which I, admittedly, aspire to belong most of the time; hopefully it is more agreeable, though, that in stylistic improvisation, more specific intent can be assumed a priori, and thus, that technical questions in the sense I am arguing we must understand the term (i.e. questions of "how") become paramount.

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Despite being disproportionately fluent in classical playing when I first got serious about improvising, no classical music, ensemble or teacher I'd ever encountered had so much as uttered the word "improvise," and so it was that a wall was constructed between my two musical worlds. I've yet to succeed in tearing this wall down completely and I'm not sure I ever will. One thing this ensured, though, is that I never fell into the trap of trying to be classically perfect in my jazz solos. That seems to me to be among the most important lessons for the legions of classical folk (all of them, apparently) who "really like jazz stuff too" and are also "totally down for getting together sometime" to go over some things (usually just once). Most classical players play scared when they first try to improvise, terrified as they are of making what an orchestral audition committee would identify as a mistake, even while it's quite likely that whatever jazz they're basing their feigned interest on was executed with a substantially higher degree of abandon.

A few years ago, it occurred to me that someone with my background and predilections really should be able to improvise in the style of Bach. When I tried it and found that I couldn't come close, I had to ask myself some tough questions, for there was clearly more preventing me from doing this than an inadequate internalization of the style. My bebop playing has never been squeaky clean, and as I say, that's not entirely by accident, but if I had perfected a cleaner approach, I certainly would be ahead of the game when it comes to improvising in traditional classical styles. As it stands, my musical mind still hasn't completely developed the ability to isolate "improvisation" from "jazz," and turning around and coupling "improvisation" with "classical tone production, articulation and intonation" has proven more challenging yet.

I actually had already encountered a related problem within jazz when I finally got serious about functioning as a bass instrument: besides the paramount challenge of finding the groove in a rhythm section, I had to face the reality that the lapses of focus I'd always gotten away with as a horn player simply won't fly if I want to be taken seriously as a viable bass instrument. This means knowing what to play next and being able to play it, always, not sometimes, and carrying on this way with little rest for up to an hour at a time. People always ask me about my chops and I tell them not to worry since I'm playing in and below the staff so much of the time; breathing is, of course, also a challenge, but there are many more constructive ways to let this direct one's personal style than I first would have thought; rather, I am more than anything mentally fried after a set of bass playing because it is so unforgiving of mental lapses. The same goes for improvising in the style of Bach: it's hard enough to play Bach cleanly as written, and so making it up as you go along demands a kind of focus and conditioning that has always been elusive to me. That's a big reason by itself why I've endeavored such an absurd thing at all, but the more I thought about it historically and aesthetically, the less absurd it seemed after all, and it has become, along with the kind of non-idiomatic solo improvisation I've discussed previously in this series, a focal point of my desire to develop an identity as a solo performer.

I see glorious opportunities for a merger of aesthetics and some creative anachronism in treating Bach movements as structures for improvisation the way jazz players treat songforms. Understand, though, that I am most decidedly not talking about playing Bach compositions in a jazz style, but rather subjecting them to the procedure jazz players use with standard material. This concept has several interesting aspects:

(1) Embellishment can go far beyond traditional Baroque ornamentation to include wholesale melodic invention over a particular harmonic structure with a particular meter and time feel. In fact, I've found it particularly fruitful to isolate particular phrases and come up with as many traditional embellishments as possible before attempting a whole-cloth improvisation; this provides a starter vocabulary for navigating this phrase, and also burns it into one's mind in just the way that is necessary to really "own" it once the training wheels come off.

While I started out "journaling" these ornaments as a way to make sure I remember them, I soon realized that this was of little value. I had a similar anxiety about jazz styles years ago, but it turned out that no matter how long I took away from jazz, it all came back remarkably quickly, I assume on account of some short but intense periods of immersion in my formative years. Those years are gone, of course, and my brain is undoubtedly substantially less plastic at age 30 than it was at 20, but Bach has been in my ear almost since birth thanks to my father, and so my aspiration here is to merely connect the skills I already have developed through jazz improvisation, classical training, and lots of time spent playing the cello suites as written. Predictably, I got much better very quickly, but it was a short honeymoon period and I now find myself in the thick of a quite arduous process of refinement. There is only added motivation in the possibility that my jazz playing could improve immeasurably this way as well.

(2) The style of Bach should prevail throughout, and "authenticity" of style (if not of gesture) should never be in doubt. However, rather than simply cataloguing a bunch of things that Bach did and limiting ourselves to them when we improvise, what if we permit ourselves to extrapolate from this material? To take some of those beguiling harmonic events precipitated by his beguiling counterpoint and make them central to our vocabulary rather than simply reducing them out of our analyses the way we're taught to in theory class? To seek our own voice within this style the way Cannonball sought his within that of Charlie Parker or Lee Morgan within that of Clifford Brown?

Classical music culture is prone to the view that this is not authenticity at all, but I disagree. I think one of the strengths of the jazz aesthetic is that imitating another player's style too closely is tolerated without being venerated; it is viewed, by some at least, as a necessary intermediate step in the learning process, but not a noble end in itself. Historically, to gain the full respect of the jazz community, there needs to be something unique and identifiable about your playing, even if it is very subtle. In classical music, we take this view towards performers but almost never toward compositional styles: a near-knockoff of Stravinsky is a full-on knockoff of Stravinsky and generally will be derided in the professional world. Conversely, Cannonball can almost be mistaken for Parker on occasion, but never beyond a shadow of a doubt, and by the time of "Somethin' Else," he was playing things that Parker, at least in his own era, never would have played. No one in their right mind would think to call this inauthenticity, but nor would they remain oblivious to these stylistic extrapolations and merely identify Cannonball as just another bop stylist; he clearly is more than that. That's my desired relationship with Bach stylism: no one could ever improve on Bach, but we can extend him through the lens of our own voices.

When this all works is when the new material "fits" with the derivative material. Of course, no such judgment on "fitting" original material within an historical style can be considered absolute, which I think explains the classical conception of authenticity as slavish recreation, i.e. as a mere evasion of this question. Imagine, though, a classical music culture that knew Bach as intimately as jazz players know Parker or rockers know Hendrix; that is, knew him not just well enough to play him with the right tone and ornamentation and tuning, or to be able to tell where all the roman numerals and non-chord tones go in an analysis, not to work towards merely being able to regurgitate material but in fact to follow that material wherever it leads you. Slowly, universitory music programs are moving towards more composition-oriented theory curricula that emphasize "owning" certain significant historical styles through the study of primary documents rather than memorizing dry theory; in fact, the Graduate Theory Review class I assisted with last semester at CalArts was taught entirely this way. We are late to the party, though, as this quite simply is what jazz players have always done by virtue of being "instant composers." Classical musicians will tell you this is a highly specialized skill, that it's "nice and all that" but that they and their little world are just fine without it; actually, it was a near-universal skill among professional musicians through at least the end of the eighteenth century which, to hear some tell it, only eroded when the bourgeoisie began demanding inclusion without making good on the high standards court musicians had previously established. Now that classical music has become hyper-bourgeoisified, one figures there's little hope of getting it back, for learning to improvise encompasses a kind of vulnerability that is the very antithesis of bourgeois comfort. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm convinced we should try.

In pursuit of this ideal, I anticipate that a severe limitation of material is necessary. It is well-documented that master improvisers the world over generally exert true mastery over a relatively small amount of material; there also are not more than a handful of solo Bach movements which are technically realistic for brass players. The thought has certainly occurred to me to pull things out of larger pieces, but for now, I'm limiting myself to movements from solo instrument suites, starting with the Minuets from the first suite in G major. The structural possibilities just with this pair are fascinating: you could state both as written before improvising on either; state and improvise over the first before moving on to the second; play the second in the relative instead of parallel minor, or even pivot in mid-stream, as in A(par)-A(rel)-B(rel)-B(par), which sounds surprisingly smooth; add free cadenzas as intros, interludes and finales; and who knows what else.

I've been working on developing all of this since last March and feel that I'm barely scratching the surface of what is possible conceptually. The technical barriers, of course, are also severe: these movements are certainly playable but are taxing nonetheless, and the improvisations are even more so. All of that notwithstanding, I'm in this for the long haul. I think that improvising over Bach in this way might be my last best chance at doing the music justice on tuba. I say this because despite no small effort, I don't feel that I've ever really mastered any of the movements I've worked up previously: they are too difficult, too unforgiving and too high maintenance. I would respectfully venture that most of the tuba players I've heard perform them in person are in the same boat, and I've been told by an accomplished teacher that the next tubist to do justice to Bach would be the first. As challenging as improvising this way might seem, I sometimes wonder if I don't stand a better chance of mastering it than I do of giving a convincing verbatim interpretation of an entire suite, the way I twice attempted as a callow undergrad. Improvisation, as intimidating as it can be at the outset, can also be subtly tailored to highlight one's strengths and cover one's weaknesses once a sufficient technical grounding is established. In this sense, what I'm really doing here is playing to my strengths, and finding a way into music which never really loved me back until now. In my opinion, nothing could be more authentic.

Toward a New Isolation (iv)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (iii)

New as it is to me, the solo improvisation endeavor presents a choice: traipse out on stage and spill my guts without any knowledge or expectation of how I'll respond physically or mentally, or "prepare" for this challenge in private before bringing a somewhat more refined but hopefully still spontaneous product out in public. Mirroring the technique discussion, these first moments of self-discovery are either the best or the worst you'll ever play depending on who you talk to: preparing could mean leaving your best shit in the practice room, or it could mean paying your audience the respect of shitting on your time instead of theirs. I think that true naivete of the kind so valued by the former camp is a tremendously compelling thing, but also don't think it's something someone like me can ever hope to truly recapture.

I say this because while "unaccompanied solo improvisation" is new for me, neither the "unaccompanied," "solo," nor "improvisation" components are new functions in isolation, and I am of course undertaking all of this on an instrument with which I've already spent several thousand hours of my life developing other techniques and fluencies. It's not that the arguments in favor of the more naive approach don't sway me; to the contrary, probably the most eye-opening improvised music experience I've had, more so even than being thrown into my first free playing experiences with little warning, was working with a group of adult beginners as part of a weekly educational workshop. Much of the music that ensemble made had a quality which I've never really experienced in person anywhere else, and which I'm sad to say I'll never be able to produce myself. The reason I say that is because it was not just the "free" setting that was relatively new to these students, but in some cases also their instruments and the very idea of playing in an ensemble.

Of course, there are many unfamiliar instruments I could pick up and new musical situations I could seek out that might bring me closer to this ideal, but I would still have my entire depth of listening, performing and composing experience to contend with. The performative act itself could hardly be called naive even if the instrumental technique involved could be. Would it not still be worth it to at least see what happens? Perhaps, but the outcome I would expect gives me pause. To elaborate: it seems to me that most professional musicians, whether improvisors or readers, creators or recreators, end up trapped in the vast but unremarkable middle ground between true naivete and expert mastery, a middle ground which is, importantly, much easier to ascend into from the naive side than it is to ascend through to the expert side. Truly naive improvised music is a beautiful, ineffable thing, but it has an exceedingly short shelf life: the act of producing it precipitously destroys the very naivete which made it possible. Expertly crafted, technically astute improvised music can not only be equally beautiful but can be made in much larger quantities by the few who achieve the requisite skill. If there is a drawback, it is the time and effort that must be invested on blind faith that mastery is in the cards (a drawback, that is, only to the extent that the task becomes monotonous or otherwise unenjoyable).

Unaccompanied solo improvisation is indeed new to me on one important level, but not new enough on most any of the others that my very first efforts at it could truly be called naive the same way my students' could. In any case, I'm reasonably certain that when I sat down to try this for the first time on tuba, it sounded neither naive nor expert; in other words, it was the worst of both worlds, a big fat middle ground mess. For someone in this situation, picking up a totally new instrument ensures a truly naive quality in only one dimension of the performance. Surely this process could be expected to lead the player to new approaches to all of the other parameters; therein lies the greatest value of such an endeavor, but also the very antithesis of naivete, no? At that point, we've simply returned to the middle ground without our technique, something which, for reasons I outlined in the previous missive, doesn't interest me right now. I'm more inclined to pursue mastery, fraught as that mindset is with its own pitfalls.

Toward a New Isolation (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (i)

Solo (that is, "unaccompanied") tuba performance doesn't have much of a history, and what we do have is ill-suited to a building a career around. This music is, to start, just not good enough, but also neither long enough in duration nor modular enough in conception to be engaging for an entire set, let alone two or more of them in succession. The first question to ask, though, before getting too lathered up over the thought of finding a solution is whether there is a solution to be found at all. It's an uncomfortable question for a tubist (or any other musician) to face. We like to mumble something under our breath about the relative youth of our instruments, but even so, we've been around long enough that if something more interesting is ever to materialize, you'd think we would have at least sniffed it by now.

So, does unaccompanied tuba music suck because the composers writing it happen to suck, or is it because any and every composer sucks when forced to hew so closely to the severe limitations (both physical ones, which aren't going to change much, and conceptual ones, which better git to changin' in a hurry) we impose on them from the moment of a piece's conception? What the hell do you do when someone asks you to write an unaccompanied tuba piece? What can you do? I happen to believe that there is yet hope for truly "great" tuba music in a plethora of styles and settings, if not necessarily in unlimited quantities, and I would include music for tuba as an unaccompanied, unwired solo instrument therein. (In the "wired" domain, Robin Hayward's solo work with electronics is, to me at least, the most exciting development in solo tuba music in a long time. Too bad that the people most concerned with instrumental advocacy in the tuba world generally don't care for this kind of music.) I believe just as strongly that this music will not (cannot, actually) resemble the great violin, cello, flute, piano and saxophone repertoire as closely in its surface stylistic qualities as anyone familiar with truly exceptional instances of those various repertoires (including myself, I will admit) is liable to occasionally desire. And I do not believe, by the way, that the advent of this earth-shattering new tuba music "matters, " so to speak...but it does matter to me and maybe a few dozen other people in the world, some of whom don't know it yet.

A greater role for unaccompanied solo performance is just a small part of the overall equation. I do think that it is particularly overdue, though, and have thought that for several years. My reason for not pursuing it has simply been a matter of my intense attraction to and subsequent investment in polyphony. For years, the solo work was in my mind destined to be someone else's and not mine. Things can change quickly, though, and it all starts here: polyphony is, in addition to being beautiful, sophisticated, elegant, and all that stuff, also expensive, needy, difficult, fickle, contentious, perhaps even intractable. Polyphony is the homewrecker of the contemporary musico-social landscape: it's the really difficult stuff that haunted your adolescence and from which you finally, if you were lucky, made your escape in early adulthood; it's the stuff your JI friends tell you is all a big fat nineteenth century lie; it's the reeaally fun stuff that people who are reeaally good get paid reeaally well for, and therefore, that people who are just okay demand to get paid okay for. When compulsory academic ensemble participation assaulted your love of music in the back alley of student-to-faculty ratio gerrymandering, polyphony was the ski mask, the bludgeon, the smoking gun, the body bag...I could go on and on.

As perhaps you can tell, I have spent my entire compositional life, since tweendom, obsessing over polyphony, wondering why my peers and colleagues don't seem to be nearly so obsessed with it, and therefore beating my head against a long succession of proverbial walls while experiencing only fleeting moments of what I consider to be success. While I generally had my head on straight from an early age and never had worse than serviceable instruction and mentorship along the way, the number and fortitude of these walls was not something anything or anyone prepared me for. While it's too soon to give up completely, I finally decided a couple of years ago that I was overdue for a thorough consideration of any and all alternatives.

A cop-out you say? Absolutely. If my last cop-out had not proven so fruitful, I may not have seriously considered this one, but indeed, discovering the transformative nature of writing for open instrumentation changed more than my approach to orchestration: it opened me up to the possibility of further cop-outs. This latest one presents a remarkably similar scenario: in temporarily abandoning your first choice, you find that your second choice has the potential to make you better at everything you do, and also to be practical enough to stand a fighting chance of making it to the realization and documentation stages. This much I realized about solo playing years ago, but it didn't just occur to me randomly; indeed, my fixation on polyphony meant that it couldn't have. Rather, I had to become so bitter and frustrated trying to realize my ensemble music that I started to question whether I could be happy continuing in that vein for the rest of my life. I had to be driven, unfortunately by frustration in this case, to put every alternative on the table, and since monophonic solo playing more or less eliminates the part of music I value most, it was bound to be one of the very last resorts. (Socially, on the other hand, I suppose it's a bit surprising it didn't occur to me sooner.)

Musical predilections aside, there were external, "musico-social" factors which made me equally uncomfortable with the idea. Our present art music culture has been ravaged by these kinds of practical compromises: free jazz, for example, has been thoroughly co-opted and more or less absorbed into the jazz mainstream at this point not because these people saw the light but because they thought they saw an opportunity to perform without rehearsing; and of course, the tune-playing jazz mainstream itself remains terribly bogged down with third-rate lead sheet compositions which increasingly sound like parodies of themselves, and which, again, seem not to have been written so much out of personal artistic necessity as to be sight-readable on the bandstand. (You can challenge the drawing of causality here, but you can't deny that this is the path of least resistance right now, nor that there are lots of jazz musicians, including some very good ones who could be doing more interesting things, taking it frequently and unapologetically.)

Within my own aesthetic, a turn toward solo playing reeks of this kind of triangulating. I couldn't see much more in it than that for a long time, and I have to admit that part of me still feels that way. The greatest redeeming value here, I eventually realized, is that the tremendous conceptual and physical challenges it presents make incredible "cross training" for my other work which I'd be hard-pressed to duplicate any other way. That realization (I wouldn't be offended if we called it an excuse) finally got me thinking seriously about taking the plunge. Unfortunately, as soon as I had allowed myself to consider it, I realized that I was in far too deep, that too many people were relying on me to play in their ensembles, and that there was no hope of a socially graceful exit from only some of them that might allow me the time and space I needed to truly take this new direction.

This all began to play out in my head years ago, which is to say that I didn't come to California or to CalArts to become an unaccompanied tuba soloist: I came here, like I came into the world, full of false hope for a polyphonic consummation. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. I will say that CalArts really is just about as pluralistic as you've heard it is, and that this is a good thing, but when people out here say "Performer-Composer," most of them are not thinking first and foremost about Ellington or Prokofiev. There's no hostility here towards notated symphonic music, but nor is there any particular inertia in its favor, and I would venture that this is true of almost all of the many musical styles in play at the school. This actually is a problem, I think, the dark side of pluralism if you will, which is not to say that I in any way prefer the University of Minnesota's tyrannical conservatory approach, only that the alternative is not perfect either. A friend on the cusp of graduation in another discipline referred to her experience attending CalArts as "a scream into a void." My favored metaphor as a music student has been the "padded cell." All of that is to say that aesthetic pluralism can be a matter of eclecticism and condensation or it can be one of indifference, apathy and relativism; it can be active or passive, focused or distracted, a posture or a pose. CalArts seems to me to have largely (though not entirely) mitigated the friction which bogs down students at so many other schools, and along with it any hope of traction either, if that makes any sense.

A further problem, regardless of commitment, is that of community. In my eyes, the concept of postmodern fragmentation of culture, or the idea that everyone now has their own style of music, like a Pandora station, is felt no less acutely by those of us making the music than by those who only listen to it, and more specifically, by those musicians whose work is inherently collaborative. It often seems to me that the very possibility of "like minds" has dwindled down to almost zero: the erosion of common practice (or any possibility of it), the sheer quantity of music being made and the ease of distributing and acquiring it all mean that no two musicians show up to school, work or play with much in common, nor, more importantly, with any obvious way to compel each other to pretend to beyond the possibility of a paycheck.

What is particularly crippling about this condition is that our polemics have fragmented along with our aesthetics. Rarely, then, are battles fought by people my age over concepts as global as absolute versus program music or over styles as different as serialism and minimalism. (Of course, many of the principals of that last one are still alive, but again, I'm talking about people under 30). Rather, we seem doomed to bicker over comparatively subtle, internecine questions. In Minneapolis at least, a "free jazz" group that uses a little bit of written music will have an easier time opening for a commercial rock band than getting booked on a series run by "improvised music" people who are militantly anti-notation. Groups that once actively despised each other (surely some continue to anyway) now play off each other's novelty value and trade "street cred," whereas close musical constituencies are torn apart by comparatively subtle artistic differences.

In a post-common-practice era, challenges to our musical ways of life have to hit particularly close to home to so much as appear to be directed at us at all, and as such, we tend to end up in engaged in actual conflicts with our friends more often than our enemies. It is certainly true that the older "global" issues often underly the contemporary "local" conflicts I'm describing; my point remains that these "local" conflicts are greater in number and, by definition, fought among people who really should be working together rather than, as I think you could argue about many of the older polemics, among people who really shouldn't. (Alternatively, it can and will be argued that people my age and younger don't argue over the big ideas because the internet has made us into shallow thinkers with short attention spans. Consider yourselves warned that the more I hear that, the longer and more verbose my blog posts will become.)

Put another way, even if you disagree that these subtle differences in experience and taste are as crippling as I am making them out to be, perhaps you'll agree that the empowerment of the individual in absence of monolithic tradition wielded as a bludgeon in the various bygone manners of species counterpoint, serialism or bebop means that seemingly minor aesthetic differences can become comparatively magnified by what might be variously called ego, self-determinism, artistic vision, or whatever. That musicians with nearly identical backgrounds can arrive at vastly different aesthetics is a beautiful thing, and as such long-overdue in Western musical culture. What's not so beautiful is that they likely will also come to irreparably despise each other, and only more acutely precisely for having both laid claim to the same confluence of ideas. With biodiversity comes competition, predation, and familiarity breeding contempt, and hence what might once have been called like-mindedness instead becomes internecine strife.

Many students come to CalArts to start over, and some in fact to start for the first time. If they so much as behave themselves, they leave with a NASM accredited degree and five- or six- figure student debt regardless of what they've accomplished academically or artistically. (If this doesn't bother you on some level or another, you must be either an arts administrator, an elected official, or both.) A professor here told me after my audition that, "People come here to become what you already are." Flattered as I was, and, for some reason, in no way dissuaded from enrolling, the aforementioned fragmentation of aesthetics was already on my mind. In the broadest sense, everyone in the Performer-Composer program is here for remarkably similar reasons, but our specific orientations are incredibly diverse. It seems to me looking around the room each week during our forum that we don't work with each other nearly as much as with students from the "straight" performance and composition programs, who might better serve our specific purposes, have less of an aesthetic axe to grind, and let's face it, generally need stuff to do. I don't think this is a coincidence.

So, here I am, casualty of the postmodern condition, one unlike mind among many, the polyphonic guy who got stuck with the monophonic instrument, the misanthrope who who hitched his life's wagon to a collaborative art, the lines-and-dots composer who enrolled at the accredited American music school with the most improvisors per capita, and the graduate student who showed up there in order to consolidate all of this, not to start over. Suffice it to say, though, that given the already mounting frustration I faced on many of these same fronts in Minneapolis, I did arrive in California with both a very clear picture of what starting over could look like and an exceedingly short fuse when it comes banging my head against the wall that stands between me and my polyphonic dreams. That fuse ran out sometime in February, and I've since begun my first serious investigation of unaccompanied solo performance. The above (yes, all of it) is merely an introduction in light of which I want to share, in the next missive, some early reflections on this process, which I believe is headed for a very fruitful, if hard-won, consummation.