. . . in relation to the unknown

My dad once said to me that philosophy is "highly destructive of certainty." Thus prompted, I want to enumerate some (possibly novel) observations about certainty which come from outside philosophy's academic silo. In doing so, I affirm the above remark as a serviceable mandate for philosophy proper, on top of whatever more parochial application it may find day-to-day; but I suggest, also, that the "destructive" bent is not philosophy's alone, and that, in fact, this oft-hidden "philosophical" potential of so many other intellectual and cultural practices is precisely what redeems them beyond their parochial circumstances of origin. In fact we may be "doing philosophy" while we're doing something else, whether we realize it or not; but this can be the case only if certain peculiar conditions are met therein.

---

Christopher Lasch's chapter "The Soul of Man under Secularism," which is the final chapter of his The Revolt of the Elites, contains the following passage:

In the commentary on the modern spiritual predicament, religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, not as a challenge to complacency and pride. Its ethical teachings are misconstrued as a body of simple commandments leaving no room for ambiguity or doubt. Recall Jung's description of medieval Christians as "children of God [who] knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves." . . .

What has to be questioned here is the assumption that religion ever provided a set of comprehensive and unambiguous answers to ethical questions, answers completely resistant to skepticism, or that it forestalled speculation about the meaning and purpose of life, or that religious people in the past were unacquainted with existential despair. The famous collection of songs written by medieval students preparing for the priesthood Carmina Burana would be enough in itself to dispel this notion; . . .

Or consider the varieties of religious experience analyzed by William James in his book of that name, . . . Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation—which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively modern but in the bitterness always felt toward a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish—often become the prelude to conversion.

(pp. 242-243)

For Lasch here, "religion" may be "a challenge to complacency and pride." Is it also destructive of certainty? He says only that certainty is not something that religion necessarily provides. Above all, he sees suggestions to the contrary as a kind of motivated slander issuing from the apostles of "secularism"; in other words, from his book's eponymous "elites." That is more so what is at issue in the above passage.

I happen to think he has a fair point here, despite being a deeply "secular" person myself. Still, it is curious to return to his previous book, The True and Only Heaven, and find the following:

The scientific worldview, [William James] argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. . . . Science . . . had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. . . . Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. . . . It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life.

(p. 289)

Now, if what today's mandarin technocrats "long" for is "to live in a risk-free world," perhaps they are not doing a very good job; perhaps they have become irreverrent of "verification" in precisely such matters as verification ought apply to most rigorously; perhaps they have found the sheer scale and scope of their scientific problems unamenable to control, and so simply given up on "verification" wherever insistence upon it threatens to slow their advance. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for one, has powerfully argued this about forecasting and forecasters; and this, anyway, is what so often appears to have happened most any time a new technology is released into the world without its behavior being fully predictable or its effects fully foreseeable. (And how could they be?)

This latter book of Lasch's is subtitled "Progress and its Critics"; but the legitimate critique of scientific progress seems to me to issue from within science's own walls: the whole problem is an irreverence for "verification," not an over-reverrence for it.

But of course science cannot really be about "certainty" either, because true certainty doesn't exist. How often have all of us non-scientists (and non-doctors and non-economists) been scolded to that effect in recent decades? And, how selective and unidirectional this scolding has been!

The reality is that some houses of worship are full of bullheaded hypocrites, just as some institutions of higher learning give safe harbor to sloppy methodologists and bad-faith polemcists. As my undergraduate Music History prof, David Grayson, aptly put it, "It is the destiny of great music to be played badly."

It would be overstating the case to say that "science" or "religion" (or "philosophy" or "music") are necessarily "destructive of certainty," but all can have this effect, depending on how they are practiced. It is the element of practice, as conspicuously absent from Lasch's remarks as from those of his retrospective adversaries, which is ultimately determinative of such outcomes as he is concerned to examine. The Jamesian notion of "quality of belief" can never get us quite all the way to practice. That quality and that belief have to be realized somehow, realized in earthly deed and not just in thought or word. I think that "conduct of life" is not quite the same thing as what I mean to denote here by "realized."

The historical baggage of (and inherent tensions between) religion and science, so-called, make it nearly impossible to parse the issue of practice without adopting a certain degree of methodological philistinism. Again, a high "quality of belief" is of no help here; it more easily blinds us to some otherwise obvious conclusions if we do not take pains to circumvent it. But if we can manage at least this much, then we need not abandon any particular beliefs of our own in order to see, more broadly, that "quality of belief," when it is "realized" in "practice," can (and probably will) lead to the destruction of myriad easy certainties that had taken root prior to the "conversion"; we can see, in other words, that "philosophy" in its certainty-destroying capacity can be practiced through almost any cultural medium, but that not just any quality of belief or of practice will get us all the way there; in yet other words, a high quality of belief realized in exemplary practice can transfigure a seemingly benign earthly pursuit into a fully "philosophical" one; and of course, a low quality of belief or merely perfunctory practical activity makes this exalted outcome impossible, even when the "music" being "played" this way is widely conceded to be "great."

By "methodological philistinism" I mean merely to suggest a way of getting past the obvious fact, inconvenient for both sides of any fraught cultural conflict, that the belief and practice of most exponents, most of the time, is very low. The fallacy of incomplete evidence is always available to those wishing to show that their adversaries have sought mere "intellectual and emotional security" rather than the "challenge to complacency and pride" that comes from commitment and struggle. It would be notable if an author of Lasch's persuasion could show in more detail that this or that commitment to this or that lifeway really did coax a higher "quality" out of its exponents. Failing that, I have only my own haphazard experiences and anecdotes to fall back on, whereby all signs point unequivocally to Jung's purported caricature of Christians being, actually, quite a servicable portrait of every form of ostensible commitment I have run across face-to-face. It is very rare for anything else to be the case. I am suggesting, though, that there are certain commonalities among the committed exceptions, even though they may belong to incommensurable cultural forms, even to the most infamously incommensurable forms, "science" and "religion."

The aim here is not to deny the incommensurability but merely to notice what is wrong with Lasch's remarks, in spite of all that is right with them. James-as-rendered-by-Lasch has badly mistaken the scientific "respect for facts" for heedless worship of them. But to really "respect" facts is something else entirely. This is neither the exclusive burden nor the exclusive privilege of science. Respect per se is precisely the precondition for adeptness at any cultural practice.

Of course in a culturally pluralistic environment one had better be quite careful about paying such respect, about daring even to speak of such minimum "facts" as are necessary to establish preliminarily. How to handle this? There have been entire libraries filled with that kind of advice, and with chronicles of its refinement through practical application. There is nothing "childish" about this literature! Quite the opposite.

---

The thing about rationalism that leads the same word to denote a properly philosophical school or lineage, a Silicon Valley subculture, and a potentially deal-breaking trait on dating apps, is precisely that it is destructive of certainty. It may be possible for certain entrepreneurial types to outwit others by reasoning their way to near-certainties which remain opaque to normie-brained competitors, but I'm not sure that this practical application, with its positivistic orientation and narrow scope, serves as a good proxy for everything that a good-faith social actor is confronted with in today's world-at-large. Lack of certainty is one thing, surfeit of illusion is quite another. Human beings are illusion-generating machines. Illusion is constantly being created anew, faster and in greater quantities than any proper "science" or "philosophy" can address it. Only the most pressing or salient matters can be addressed, or (eventually) address themselves; the rest of it skates.

Lasch's chapter of course begins in his dissent from those "1960s revolutionary" slogans which were "much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx"; in dissent from "the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, . . . leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art" (p. 234); from Wilde's notion that Christ was himself the "most supreme of individualists" (p. 232); and so on.

Lasch holds that "this kind of message" merely "confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd." "In place of self-denial and self-control, it offered the seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familiar, or religious obligations." (p. 233) "The unexamined premise that history can be compared with the individual's growth from childhood to maturity . . . made it possible to condemn any form of cultural conservatism, any respect for tradition." (p. 237)

Wilde's particular rhetoric may well be worthy of the criticism, and so too may be most of the "artists" who have attempted to make good on it, but it seems, also, that this same criticism cannot apply equally or in the same form to any-and-all ways of being an "artist." Already in the suggestion that life-as-art might be "unconstrained" by any "obligations," something is very wrong. (Recall once again Dr. Grayson's quip.) Much great art of the past seems, at least in hindsight, to have been hatched under severe "constraints," a point which "cultural conservatives" and antimodernist critics never miss an opportunity to reiterate. If Lasch did intend to cast his lot with this tendency, he has buried that intent beneath myriad contrary innuendos.

The Danish radical artist Asger Jorn made a distinction between "art" and "critique" which is very relevant here. Jorn called art "primary action in relation to the unknown," whereas "critique" is "a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists." Of course another way of saying that something "already exists" is to say that its existence is certain. All certainty is precious! The mere "existence" of an artwork is unlikely to be an outright illusion, Warhol and Duchamp notwithstanding; but artworks bring along with them into existence all manner of illusions about the intent, meaning, and value of the work. Intent, meaning, and value are most of what matter about art to most people, but they are often inscrutable, even if the mere existence of the work and certain observations about its formal properties are beyond question. Hence disputes over intent, meaning and value account for most of what goes under the heading, Philosophy of Art.

I think it is because of this inscrutability and not in spite it that these aspects, far more so than the mere artifacts or formal properties themselves, are the customary bases of critique, even long after academic art criticism has contrived an identity for itself as "objective." A mere homage or counterfactual to the form-and-content of an existing artwork is hardly a critique at all unless it bleeds into questions of intent, meaning, or value. That is precisely what is "secondary" about a "secondary reaction," and what is "primary" about "primary action": the bases of critique are epistemically very tenuous, but they are taken as given "facts" about the artwork and about the artist. Conversely, the object of "primary action" is "the unknown," the un-certain; art as primary action pleads uncertainty about the intent, meaning, and value of its antecedents, even as it also is, as all contemporary art must be, a "reaction" to some already-existing forms and artifacts.

What would it mean for someone to underdraw the boundaries of their own certainty based on an illusion? It's not clear that this has any ramifications for Jorn's formulation. If an artist is truly uncertain in the moment of creation, and if that uncertainty is truly their object, then there is the possibility of "primary action." (Of course if a critic interviews them about their state of mind, or tries to read the resulting work for psychological tells, expect the illusions to come at you fast.)

What would it mean to overdraw the boundaries of one's certainty? This is more familiar, and it does, plainly, come to bear on "critique."

What is wrong with Lasch's chapter, then, is that he has merely presented the reverse caricature of the one he is writing against. He has committed the same fallacy of incomplete evidence. The fallacy is the same because certain contours of the problem are the same in religion, science, philosophy, and art: it is easy enough for outsiders to form a certain uncharitable view based on the lowest common denominator of practitioners; at this, the adepts are bound to cry foul, but there is little they can do to compel a higher quality of belief in their cohort.

It's a bit of a stretch (but only a bit) to rephrase Lasch in Jorn's terms: Wilde claimed to be extolling life lived as a work of art, but what he (or at least his postmodern pseudo-followers) ended up extolling, instead, was life lived as a critique of all the lives which had come before, a critique of the "common herd" toward which they now felt a "sense of superiority."

In yet other words,

disillusionment, we might say, is the characteristic form of modern pride, and this pride is no less evident in the nostalgic myth of the past than in the more aggressively triumphal version of cultural progress that dismisses the past without regrets.

(pp 241-242)

Now, what is so wrong with a little bit of well-justified "disillusionment?" One problem, at least, with this "modern" form, besides its pridefulness, is that it is too knowing; it can only amount to "critique," to "secondary" rather than "primary" action. What does the knee-jerk Pollyanna rejoinder to "disillusionment" come down to but the suggestion that perhaps the pessimist does not fully know the good side of everything at issue? I tend to be pessimistic, that is, to think precisely the opposite; but I also tend to think that we do not actually manage to dig up very much of everything that is down there, good or bad, no matter how hard we try; hence the irreducible "unknown," what Donald Rumsfeld infamously called "known unknowns," in relation to which we "act" . . . if in fact that is how we understand ourselves to be acting . . . not even if but especially if we are "artists."

Conventionally the reversion to critique is parsed as a postmodern inevitability, the curse of life after-the-fact: too much has been done, too much is known too well; not enough is uncertain. But again, this can refer only to the mere existence of artifacts and formal properties. That is all that we really know about. We do not really know much about intent, meaning, or value. Most of what we know is that those things do not remain stable over time. We know that we ourselves may feel or react differently each time we confront the same inanimate physical stimulus, but we do not know exactly why. Instrumental musicians come to know this especially intimately through our peculiar kind of "practice." Yet when we encounter people who themselves do not have that kind of intimacy with the artworks or with the instruments, we constantly find them driven to desperately deny any uncertainty about intent, meaning, and value, because it is precisely (and perhaps paradoxically) these epiphenomena of artworks that people care most about. Here of all places is where audiences demand certainty, precisely where it is least forthcoming. Understandably, people are not too keen to simply abandon their most cherished intuitions to the undertow of passing time and the ever-accelerating churn of cultural relativity. But it is precisely this denial which imprisons us in critique. It is nothing about how much we really know, nothing about the instability of popular taste or about the arbitrariness of signification. Rather, it is our desire to know all, and to think that we already do. It is the old "childish desire" again. And so Lasch, though he overcorrects, also provides an indispenable piece of advice for artists and audiences, even for those of us who will never believe in God. Of course we cannot (must not) simply forget what we know; but given what precious little certainty is available to us, there really is no shortage of "unknown" arenas for "artists" to "act" in "relation" to. In fact there is an abundance of "unknowns," the more so the more exemplary our "practice" can be made. What is not abundant? The courage and intellect required to face up to it all; the same in art as in religion, philosophy, and science.

As usual, Ernest Becker has a passage which ties all of these disparate ideas together beautifully:

In the West the belief in a dual universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away, . . .   If you ask someone "where" babies come from he will tell you that they come from the union of the sperm and the egg: so sure is he that everything takes place on tangible physio-chemical levels that he thinks that one causal link in a process of unknown origin explains that process. Do we know where babies come from? Do they not indeed mysteriously spring from an invisible void? . . .   We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from.

. . . there are signs that the scientific view itself may be bending. I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers.   . . . the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it.   . . .   There seems to be empirically an invisible inside of nature from which powers erupt into the visible world from an unknown source. And since our bodies are all composed of elements which break down into atoms which break down into energy, it truly appears that we are constantly generated out of a void, that our physical form emanates from an unknown dimension which sustains it.

(The Birth and Death of Meaning, pp. 120-121)

Scientific materialism, in other words, furnishes an ever lengthier and more detailed chain of proximate causes without ever quite landing on an ultimate cause. There is no danger here of going wanting either for "facts" or for "uncertainty," or for "existential despair" if that's more your bag. It's all in the mix. Blanket ascriptions of "childishness," then, just like blanket ascriptions of adept enlightenment or religious profundity, cannot really be made, at least not to entire academic fields or cultural institutions. These ascriptions can be made only to individuals. There is no social theory of art that can modulate the epistemics of that question. The "great music" of science can be played "badly" or it can be played well; a hobbyist group can give a jagged but rousing rendition, or a celebrity professional group can give a soullessly "perfect" one. Choose your own adventure.

William James cannot serve as proxy for the sum total of modern religious practice, because there have not been very many William Jameses (perhaps there has been exactly one) in the "modern" era. There was, however, at least one, just as there have been a few model rationalists, and indeed also a few (only a few) modern artists who have insisted, always, on acting in relation to the unknown, in Jorn's sense; or perhaps what these artists have done is merely understood, as good rationalists also do, when this is actually what they are doing, and when it actually is not.

Ericsson and Pool—Peak

Ericsson and Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(2016)

---

[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...

[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-

[13]

ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.

Sennett—The Craftsman (iii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

[149]

CHAPTER 5

The Hand

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

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

Lasch—Survivalism

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Total institutions—the death camps above all—have made us aware of the banality of evil, in Hannah Arendt's famous phrase; but they have also taught us something about the banality of survival. A growing belief that heroes don't survive informs the disenchantment with conventional codes of masculinity... It is not only masculinity that has lost its survival value, however, but the entire stock of allegedly outworn ideals of honor, heroic defiance of circumstances, and self-transcendence. As Vincent Canby noted in reviewing Lina Wertmüller's movie Seven Beauties, the survivor has discovered that "idealism is self-defeating."
(p. 73)



"A number of things give us hope," write Ehrlich and Harriman in the conclusion to [How to Be a Survivor]... "The first is that survival itself is the issue. Once people understand that, they will fight like hell for it." On the contrary, people committed only to survival are more likely to head for the hills. If survival is the overriding issue, people will take more interest in their personal safety than in the survival of humanity as a whole. Those who base the case for conservation and peace on survival not only appeal to a debased system of values, they defeat their own purpose.
(p. 78)

Lasch—Instrumental and Practical Reason

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

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

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

(pp. 253-255)

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

degenerat[ion] into pure technique
.

There is the

pure technique
of the
soulless technician

and
the

pure technique
of the
postindustrial worker

.

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

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

Precisely because

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

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

Indeed,

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

(pp. 258-259)

Two On-the-Spectrum Vignettes

Ericsson and Pool
Peak (2016)

Francesca Happé and Pedro Vital, two researchers at King's College London, compared autistic children who develop savantlike abilities with autistic children who did not develop such abilities. They found that the autistic savants are much more likely than the nonsavants to be very detail-oriented and prone to repetitive behaviors. When something captures their attention, they will focus on it to the exclusion of everything else around them, retreating into their own worlds. These particular autistic people are more likely to practice obsessively a musical piece or memorize a collection of phone numbers—and thus are likely to develop skills in those areas in the same way the people engaging in purposeful or deliberate practice do.

One of the best examples of this is Donny, an autistic savant who is the fastest, most accurate calendar calculator who has ever been tested. Donny can provide the day of the week for a particular date within a second of hearing the date, and he is almost invariably correct. ...

Donny is addicted to dates... The first thing that Donny does when he meets someone is to ask for the person's birthday. He has memorized all fourteen possible yearly calendars...and he has developed ways to quickly calculate which of those fourteen possible calendars applies to any given year. When asked which day of the week a particular date will fall on, Donny focuses first on the year in order to figure out which of the fourteen calendars to use, and then he refers to that mental calendar to determine the day of the week for the date in question. In short, Donny possesses a highly developed skill that is the result of years of obsessive study, but no sign of a miraculous innate talent.

In the late 1960s, a psychologist named Barnett Addis set out to see if he could train someone of normal intelligence to do the same sorts of calendar calculations that savants do. In particular, he had been studying how two calendar-calculating twins performed their feats. The twins, who each had an IQ in the 60-70 range, were able to provide days of the week for dates out to the year A.D. 132470 within an average of six seconds. Addis found that the twins' method seemed to involve finding an equivalent year between 1600 and 2000 and then adding up numbers that corresponded to the day of the month, the month, the year, and the century. With this understanding, Addis then trained a graduate student in that method to see if it actually worked. In just sixteen practice sessions the graduate student was able to calculate just as fast as either of the twins...

The lesson here is that there is clearly nothing magical about Donny's—or any other savant's—calendar-calculation abilities. Donny developed his abilities over years of working with and thinking about dates, reaching the point where he knows each of the fourteen different calendars as well as you or I know our phone numbers, and he has developed his own technique—which, in this case, researchers still have not completely understood—for determining which calendar to use for which year. It is nothing that a motivated college student in a psychology experiment could not do.
(pp. 220-222)

Steven Mithen
The Singing Neanderthals (2006)

At the age of five, Noel had been placed in a school for children with severe learning difficulties. He was autistic—unable to make contact with other children or initiate speech—and had patterns of repetitive and obsessive behaviour associated with this condition. One of these was listening to music on the radio and then playing it by ear the following day on the school piano. The psychologists Beate Hermelin and Neil O'Connor heard about Noel when making a study of autistic savants...

They examined Noel when he was nineteen years old, when he had an IQ of 61 and an almost total absence of spontaneous speech. Hermelin and O'Connor played Greig's 'Melody', Op. 47 No. 3, to Noel and to a professional musician, neither of whom were familiar with the piece. It was played from beginning to end, and then again in short sections. After each section, Noel and the professional musician had to play it back, along with the previous sections, until finally they played the whole piece from memory. Noel gave an almost perfect rendering of all sixty-four bars of 'Melody', retaining both the melody and harmonic components and making mistakes on only 8 per cent of the 798 notes. The professional musician was only able to play 354 notes, 80 per cent of which were incorrect. Twenty-four hours later Noel gave a second near-perfect performance.

By analyzing Noel's mistakes, and undertaking tests with further pieces of music, Hermelin and O'Connor concluded that Noel's musical memory was based on an intuitive grasp of musical structure. Through his obsessive listening to music, he had acquired a profound understanding of the diatonic scales in which the majority of Western music from between 1600 and 1900 is composed... Noel combined his tonal knowledge with a tendency to focus on discrete musical phrases, rather than attending to the piece as a whole as was the inclination of the professional musician. This interpretation of Noel's ability was confirmed when he was asked to repeat Mikrokosmos by Bartók under the same conditions. This piece was composed in the 1930s and eschews the diatonic scale, falling into the category of atonal music. Noel was now markedly less successful, making errors in 63 per cent of the 277 notes he played, in contrast to the 14 per cent of errors in 153 notes played by the professional musician.
(p. 294)

Pre-Endgame Strategy

In my current situation I find the long-term rather than the short-term impacts of the quarantine most concerning, and perhaps for this reason I've frequently found myself thinking about one particular long-term concern.

Stay-at-home orders are nearly superfluous in my case, hence the lockdown has, for me, so far been little else than a welcome sabbatical from rat-racing, and a fruitful period of study (both self- and other-). The near-total lack of structure is nonetheless something which I've always found slightly hazardous. And so here is one extrinsic benefit of music education that I'll toast to: as a brass player, I figured out even before the clickbait psychojournalists did that having a routine would be essential not just to parochially musical concerns but to the general preservation of sanity. Thus the tuba hour commences at noon daily. It is really more like 20 minutes and almost never starts before 1pm. I hesitate to call this "discipline," since the timing is too loose and too brief to qualify. If it is "maintenance," then disrepair carries the day. The main objective is not to forget how to play. There are a couple of mild conceptual challenges involved and no technical ones. Part of me laments that this is what it has come to for someone who veritably haunted the practice rooms in college, and who, gun to head, still claims the tuba as the center of his increasingly entropic intellectual and creative universe. All of those misgivings being as they are, I have no doubt that I'm making made good on my frequent admonitions to young students that even this amount of practice, when it is logically structured, narrowly focused, and adhered to daily with the devoutness of a sacred ritual, can be productive and worth the trouble.

It never occurred to me to promote this ritual as a prospective lifeline to structure, invocable if the rest of the world seems to have frozen in time. Maybe I'll try that if and when I next return to teaching, since none of my other spiels have ever been the least bit effective in inspiring commitment where it did not previously exist. I am of course reluctant to expose students to the multi-layered ambivalence of the mid-career professional; that sort of radical honesty might be a bit too radical even for me. To take music and, more specifically, a musical instrument as not just a specialty but an identity, to face society as a tooba player, encompasses, as I have probably already written enough about, quite the dizzying array of privileges, struggles, and absurdities. In the present absurd conditions I do feel quite fortunate to have a readymade vehicle of routine, and I do believe the sanity-preserving function to have been borne out by this experience, but all of that merely represses the reality that it has been a decade and a half since I last found rigid adherence to a practice regimen fun and fulfilling for its own sake, and that both the duration of adherence and the intensity of "fun" have steadily diminished with time. This, taken together with the long-term inevitability of physical and mental decline, paints quite the discouraging picture of the aging brass player. Can this downward curve ever be flattened?

For all that I've invested in book learning, I am guided on the endgame question almost exclusively by two fond anecdotes which I've never bothered to investigate. First: a friend is fond of remarking that 50 year-old drivers have the fewest accidents and the lowest insurance premiums. They sit at an optimal point on the x-y graph of accumulated experience (lots) against physical decline (not yet). This seems to me a supremely relevant consideration for brass players as well, i.e. with an eye toward balancing cumulative achievement with quality of life by determining the optimal time to walk away. On which point the second, more morbid anecdote is salient, a nugget of my mother's dime-store-Marxist antisheltering, and a burden which more conventional American parents would never reveal to a pre-adolescent child: when all people do for 50 years is work, they often don't know what to do with themselves upon retiring, even if they thought they would; and when people don't know what to do with themselves in this profound sort of way, even when they thought they would, they often just die.

If the "x-y graphs" and "optimization" of the first anecdote sound too fully rationalized or mathematical to be useful in Real Life, then the urgency of death inspired by the second anecdote ought to be motivation enough to embrace them. Overlaid on all of that, for me at least, is the question of what Erikson called "generativity," essentially the province of culture's 50 year-old drivers, and for me split (not always happily) into generativity that pays the bills and generativity that feeds the soul. While I certainly tend to look forward to a day when I have played my last corporate ice cream social, even I would grant that a withdrawal from that kind of work represents a certain loss of identity in a society where your work defines you. (I think I want to live in a society that is not like that, but this is unlikely to happen.) By the same token, having developed out of tuba playing all kinds of peripheral intellectual and creative interests, the thought of someday making those peripheral interests central, without the tuba there to ground them, has always been both superficially appealing and deeply scary. Be it a privilege or a chore depending on the day, tuba playing is both the initial inspiration and the ultimate outlet for those other pursuits. Hence I fear equally the old-age regret of having stopped playing too soon, leading to a loss of focus in the other areas, and that of hanging on too long, wasting time doing subpar tuba work when that time could be more fruitfully devoted to the other areas. To be sure, both of these prospective regrets seem, literally, deadly. Thus I think it is reasonable to consider such scenarios ahead of time, before moments of choice are upon you. Tweeting about having a "no regrets" outlook regarding the things you can't control is no substitute for seeking foresight and taking initiative regarding things that are very much within your control.

To wit, I would conjecture that the optimization function f(tuba) is bimodal: either (a) give up playing young enough that a new generative identity can form, or (b) hang on to the one you've got til the bitter end, perhaps reinventing your aesthetic as your declining technique dictates. The third, more conventional option, as mutually determined by social and structural norms, is Retirement at the socio-structurally appointed Retirement Age. Many musicians simply aren't able to pursue this the way people with real jobs can, and some who could and should pursue it neglect to do so. The denouement of COVID will have a lot to do with whether or not this course is even available to me. That aside, I think that Retirement is plainly incoherent with not one but both of the above anecdotes; it is incoherent with considerations of identity, aesthetics, and achievement alike; in a word, it is incoherent with psychobiology itself. And so without denying that Retirement represents a privilege of sorts, I think it is my third choice. I view it as a privilege only relative to the fourth option: working myself into the grave. And so as events continue to unfold, I will be focused on playing a good pre-endgame.

Career Designs: Relative and Absolute Privilege, and the Even Keel

I seldom go long between social encounters with laypeople bent on idealizing my career choice on my behalf, the customary remark being something about "following your passion." Needless to say that my peers and colleagues are rarely quite so saccharine when discussing music as a vocation. The combined effect of these contradictory expressions can be disorienting, though to be sure they both betoken a familiar grass-is-always-greener outlook as well as the facility with which we can put either face on things, not just in our various interfaces with outsiders but also in our own minds. That is, we may reason relatively, as the layperson tends to (think Symphony Tubist vs. Ice Road Trucker), or we may present our real situation (statistically speaking, probably not anything like Symphony Tubist nor anything approaching it) in absolute terms.

There are good reasons for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to keep sight of the relative sense, if not merely to avoid saying something that they might later regret. But if The Arts so broadly construed are thought to have even the slightest objective social utility, then there is, dare I say, a reciprocal imperative on the extra-artistic world to keep sight of the absolute sense in which the vast majority of artists one can expect to meet face-to-face are dealing with much the same mixed bag of joys and sorrows that any committed professional does.

For me, music certainly has proven a potent avenue through which to learn that sources of great joy are uniquely suited to pile on great heaps of sorrow, and are typically also quite happy to oblige. This is a Life Lesson with implications beyond the narrow concerns of any one profession, yet I doubt that someone who has never truly devoted themselves to a calling can meaningfully understand it, particularly because it is a profoundly dualistic statement whose reverse does not hold: sources of great sorrow, as a group, are not particularly likely to also be sources of great joy. There is something in there about the wretchedness of the human condition, I think, but that is another topic for another time. More to the point is that the irreversibility of this fundamental vocational principle is what causes so much of our dialogue with outsiders to remain rhetorically anchored in the notion of relative privilege. To posit this relative privilege as a defining characteristic of artisthood, however, is to commit three related errors: first, by obfuscating its non-exclusivity to The Arts; second, by defining The Arts via what they are not; and third, by failing to account for the fact that this roller-coaster ride of privilege and obligation is quite a bit more than the sum of its parts.

Indeed, this latter reality is why so many of us academy-trained creatives were at some point told by an institutionally-sanctioned mentor not to get "too high or too low." If we were in fact told this, then we were, for one thing, fortunate to have fished out of the academic miasma at least one person who knew what they were talking about, and this in spite of their own relatively privileged position in the selfsame anti-meritocracy which we ourselves ostensibly aspired to enter. This much we may even have realized at the time. Less apparent back then, in all likelihood (and ever more so with "privilege" in seemingly perpetual ascendance as a watchword) was that we were being asked to withdraw from the relative into the absolute, to set our own standards for success rather than triangulating based on the messages being sent to us by the external social world; all of which is to say that every degree of failure to meet these internally-generated standards which is occasioned by an external factor makes it that much harder to swallow the more strident critiques of bourgeois art currently in circulation.

I am certain that my musical mentors were also correct in advising that "You get out of it what you out into it," and I expect that this is a less controversial statement than the one immediately preceding it. Precisely because this is such good advice in all areas of human endeavor, non-initiates of virtually any stripe getting a rare window in on the artist's habitus are bound to fixate on what appears to them as a conspicuous lack of either putting-in or getting-out. In fact you can't even admit to other musicians that you're not available for any reason other than that you already have a gig, and especially not if the real reason is that you've blocked out time to get out of public view and hone your craft. Suffice it to say that I speak from experience on this point. It is a phenomenon which, again, speaks to many larger human concerns which ought not be dredged up in too much detail right this minute. Even if you're not a professional artist, you can probably relate an analogous situation that you've faced, and if so, then perhaps you've also caught yourself thinking that privilege is a more complicated concept than the lowest common denominator of armchair theorists is capable of giving it credit for.

---
Time has a strong existential claim to being the most valuable personal resource, but I for one, millenial that I am, find focus per se to be the scarcest of all, which conventionally and practically speaking makes it the most valuable too. Hence the focus here on what I am calling the even keel. The advent of leisure time has an unimpeachable place in the study of history whereas the subset focused time remains incomprehensibly decadent even to some career academics. Hence the external social pressure to self-flagellate at the altars of myriad political interest groups is thrown into higher relief by the question of focus than by that of time even though the latter speaks to more basic political issues.

For the artist, this pressure creates palpable tension with an outside world which in spite of its boggling diversity of political orientation and worldview is seemingly quite unified in its intent to define art and artists relatively rather than absolutely. I have to think that anyone reading this can readily conjure the vastly different versions of infinite regress that, say, Bernie People and Trump People can be counted upon to summon in this respect. The region along this spectrum where inhabitants risk being accused of harboring an unseemly "relativism" is rather small and remote, yet there is, at the minimum, relativistic thinking in evidence both in the soft-Marxist critique of bourgeois art and in the contemporary red-state contempt for Artsy-Fartsies as against red-blooded, mammal-eating Americans. Both rhetorics cherrypick small differences and explode them into full-blown deviance. There is as well a characteristic distrust of the abstract and the unmeasurable which is a defining feature of the era of sclerotic institutions. (Hey arts non-profit people, can you say "measurable outcomes?") I would love to convince myself that these are essential mechanisms of social accountability upon which artists can profitably draw both in the content of their work and the living of their lives. What I actually stand convinced of is that this relativistic streak is merely a low-stakes commission of several deadly sins with which we are all familiar no matter what we do for a living.

That is to say that those who would accuse me of "following my passion" seem to be saying as much about themselves as about me. If they were merely expressing support or admiration, I suspect the wording of choice would be rather different; and of course if they knew what I actually have done for money over the years and how much of it has had nothing to do with music, they might have bitten their tongues altogether. It is just as easy for me to lapse into idealizing the many other fields I could have gone into; but alas, whereas enabling a select group of artists to live as solid middle-class earners has been an enduring project of the actual institutional bourgeoisie, the rise of the gig economy perversely relegates a great many others to live as only artists used to. Here as always, then, the term "professional" is used literally, reluctantly, and advisedly. Nihilism is the ultimate even keel, especially as human suffering becomes ever more visible; hence no "professional" milieu will ever lack for nihilists. As in most every other respect, The Arts are neither immune from nor especially exemplary of this reality.

On The Seasons Needing Me More Than I Need Them

If Southern California is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition for newcomers, it is hated-until-proven-loved for those who have never actually been here, the latter condition being both cause and effect of some curious and uniquely wayward folk wisdom. To wit, both immediately before and immediately after my relocation, a few ostensibly thoughtful Minneapolitans raised the possibility that I would “miss the seasons” living in a place which, as far as they were concerned, didn't have any.

Given that the only Minnesota season anyone could miss is the fall (and that Minnesotans spend pretty much the entire year missing it), I was not particularly strongly inclined to heed this warning. In fact it was unclear whether it was indeed to be parsed as a warning or just a theory; ergo, I parse it as a projection. The implication that seasons give requisite shape to life and that the quadripartite structure peculiar to the North is somehow inherently salutary in this way certainly betokens a degree of exceptionalism worthy of a much larger city.

Since moving to California I have given thought to the season question every year around this time; that is, when the weather changes. If we are lucky enough to be rained on in any significant amount over the next several months, that will likely cue more of the same thoughts. And certainly whenever the next bonafide heat wave strikes, exaggerating as it surely will the endtimes vibe one often detects here during times of duress and sometimes just because, I will surely be given yet further occasion to ponder the contour that these changes in the weather do give to my year, subtle as that contour is to the point being undetectable by the freshly uprooted Midwestern soma. Because I am imperfect and petty, I will probably also have a private chuckle vis-a-vis the combination of clouded judgment and reliance on outsider mythmaking through which projected jealousy is most facilely projected. But above all, I will most definitely give thanks for the way a subtler seasonal profile works it’s magic without being so damn disruptive.

In cold-weather locales of the post-Christian world, the disruptions tend to come in waves this time of year, so much so that their long-awaited clearing up itself becomes disruptive whenever it finally takes hold. As perhaps you could have guessed from the tone here, this is a roller coaster ride that I never tolerated well or willingly. The just-noticeable contours of Southern California living are far better suited to the purposes of those of us who prefer (nay, require) the open-endedness of slow, steady, incremental, but always-ongoing progress in our life’s work. Think gentle undulations rather than jagged, disorienting tremors, the climatological analog of the work profile you've never stopped thanking your music teachers for instilling in you.

Among those slower-idling Midwesterners who have ventured far enough afield to speak with some empirical authority, terms like "intense," "incessant," and "rat race" are customarily applied to the bigger fish bowls. Somehow I have still never been to New York City and hence know it only the way so many outsiders know Los Angeles, but through many friends' anecdotes communicated to me over the years I have indeed formed an image of it not only as the music capital of the world but also as the world capital of disruptions. As the folk wisdom would have it, some people thrive in such an environment and others wilt, and this is part and parcel of that famous New York exceptionalism that both Midwesterners and Californians know well whether or not they've visited: The City as crucible. Of course New York also has both its cold weather and its holidays, and more (in)famous conflagrations of the two than most anywhere else, but the master narrative I've been lead to construct would simply fold those more parochial concerns into one giant disruption, the proverbial jackhammer at 3am that I might literally have heard about a dozen times at this point.

A hundred years ago Southern California was declared "enervating" by faster-idling newcomers from the east. Out here, that which is incessant is thought to have quite the opposite effect of an early morning construction crew: sunshine, warmth, beaches, scantily clad young things, and so on, a panoply of luxuries thought perfectly designed to numb even the most ambitious among us into complacency. Hence a former colleague of my father's is said to have once turned down a job offer from an institution in San Diego on the grounds that he would never get anything done there. One can only hope, for his sake, that this gentleman was speaking from a place of great self-knowledge and not from the same place of ignorance that so many other outsiders do. For my part I must confess skepticism that the particular diversions San Diego of all places offers up could keep someone who is just that committed to scholarship entertained for more than a day or two. In any case, that is about the longest I ever need to be entertained before going back down the rabbit hole; hence all such questions of how to take a vacation when you already live in a vacation spot, of the ongoing temptation of such amenities on a day-to-day basis, all those questions are moot to me. More importantly, the longer, more comprehensive interruptions occasioned by Seasonal Affective Disorder, Spring Fever, and the like are no longer acceptable to me simply as the cost of doing business.

I for one have found Los Angeles to provide a healthy balance of ass-kicking mishaps and creature comforts. It periodically reminds you that you're alive while actually permitting you to enjoy it on occasion. If there is indeed some hard-wired need for seasonal contour, I have to think that we acclimate to the scale of change just as we acclimate to more obvious swings in temperature. Taken together, those two things solve the imagined problem quite parsimoniously indeed.

Reductionism Lurks at Every Turn

In what goes for recommitment to tuba playing in my world these days, I decided at the beginning of the summer to return to an old incomplete project: the quintuplet, and making it feel and sound natural. This chicken scratch is a (very) rough record of the tasks I devised as they occurred to me.

(Perceptive music-schoolers and others with a taste for flash-and-trash will detect that the Monti Csardas was also on my stand at the inception of this endeavor. Beyond that general confession, I claim the 5th.)

Within the first few days I realized that I'm a very long way from being able to play entire passages in "5 time" against the 2, 3, or 4 time of an obstinate metronome. The need for simplicity and baby steps necessarily led me away from bits of "real" music and precipitously toward material chosen and constructed strictly for it's articulation of the desired rhythmic groups and not at all for its intrinsic qualities as music. And that is to say that this old bugaboo, about which I've spilled so much virtual ink already, applies to rhythm and time as well as it does to pitch material, something I hadn't really stopped to consider until now.

This much should have been obvious, but of course Classical musicians are infamously disinclined to give rhythm its due (specially appointed timekeepers notwithstanding), and even then too often in a mechanical, unaesthetic way. Even in spite of an early interest in jazz, timefeel as an isolable area of inquiry beyond the enforced literalness and rationality of Classical training somehow managed to elude me completely until my brain was no longer plastic enough nor my extremities unbiased enough to facilitate speedy progress. Jazz bass functions have served as a humbling and practical lens through which to attempt improvement, but one very much tied to particular historical styles which I drift in and out of and, sadly, have precious little opportunity to perform. And so in wrestling with fundamental metric modulations vis-a-vis "small whole number ratios," I hope not only to clean up the pulses themselves but also to sear them into my tempo memory as conceptual guideposts between which more fudgy in-between speeds might be located, the latter task being, to me, potentially much more interesting than the Tyranny Of The Grid which seems to prevail among most others who have taken the time to give this kind of thing the attention it deserves.

Moderating the Tyranny of Specialism

If there is such a thing academically/intellectually as a "young (wo)man's game," the question for those of us so enmeshed becomes: why continue to specialize in middle age?

Galenson's thesis in Old Masters and Young Geniuses supports this thinking. "Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find," the latter at surprisingly young ages and often never again. Hence, no matter what we've found (or not) as an adolescent, perhaps middle age is our cue to start seeking.

Put another way, it is interesting to consider whether there are discernible landmarks of achievement lying afield of Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Where in the outer reaches of the life cycle might they fall? And what, then, about the relative worth of, say, 50,000 hour mastery in comparison to a broadening of horizons 500 hours at a time? Perhaps the latter might enable the 10,000 hour master to apply his or her already-substantial achievement to a wide range of immediate, human problems; and indeed, to better understand of his or her own accord what exactly constitutes an immediate, human problem in the first place? I will always be the first to make room for supreme achievers in the Bach or Coltrane mold, but I have had to accept that I am simply not wired for that path.

Glenn Gould famously blurted out something that every music teacher has thought to themselves when he remarked that he could explain everything about playing the piano in a half-hour while the student could spend the rest of his or her life applying this knowledge. Certainly 10,000 hours of practice sounds like a good minimum target for aspiring Professors of Applied Music seeking to unpack the technical and historical vicissitudes of their respective instrumental traditions; it is also wholly inadequate when it comes to mastering the composition, delivery, and contextualization of their own half-hour lectures. And so it must not be regarded as a mere formality, as it seems to have been throughout much of American academia for a very long time, that the latter and not the former is what these Professors are *actually* paid to do. Clearly some extra seasoning is in order; and if simply having Life Experiences® was all it took, every washed up conservatory brat would be magically transformed into a master teacher the moment their teenage child(ren) became sufficiently angsty to impose some long-overdue introspection. There would be middle-aged gurus in designer workout clothes falling from proverbial trees. We can only wish it were that simple.

Anecdotally, I have seen many peers (and myself) become increasingly unable to sustain the multi-hour instrumental practice regimen of college music school into early middle age. Those of us who at least met the barest of curricular time-banking expectations along the way and have continued to find smidges of focused practice time on a daily basis eventually backed into rather than charged into the 10,000 hour club, with all of its privileges and obligations, and with no hope of ever reaching whatever further thresholds might exist in the Gladwellian great beyond. When this first became apparent to me I took it as a serious blow to my self-esteem, committed as I was for many years to an intense practice regimen at the expense of virtually every other facet of personal development. I wanted to be a 50,000 hour tubamaster, or at least I had tried very hard to convince myself that I did. Further, though my hands now covered my face, I couldn't help peeking through my fingers at peers for whom the onset of Real Life® seemed to mark not just the end of their musical development but their personal development as well. It was both a shock and a relief to emerge from such twenty-something doldrums to find that my own desire for personal development had not abated along with my inclination to prioritize tuba playing over all else; and so I decided to listen to what my brain and body alike were trying to tell me: "You're already a specialist, and unless you throw your horn off a bridge, you'll always be one. Now go make it your own."

Just as most all of the principal players of the 20th century's greatest orchestras would fail to advance beyond today's preliminary round auditions on account of their individuality, so too would the areas in which many of history's greatest minds made their lasting contributions today be considered "beyond their competence" on account of vulgar credentialism's logic of accountability. To be clear, I do believe that membership in the 10,000 hour club is a necessity, and that eclecticism is a decidedly members-only area. But given that this number is pursued in a timely enough fashion for its own inner logic to hold, there ought to be plenty of life left during which to find a balance that meets your needs and fits your budget. So get to it.

Driving The Bus (i)

Since moving to SoCal I've had the pleasure of meeting, hearing, and playing with a staggering number of outstanding jazz bass players. I have however occasionally been troubled by the evenness of attack in some of the walking lines I have heard here. The great bebop and post-bop bass players' lines were full of subtle slides, bends, and hitches; they constantly varied their attacks, often using extreme registers and unlikely intervals to create small- and large-scale contours that gave the music its signature propulsive energy.

I have had this thought before, but never about bass playing that was unimpeachable in virtually every other respect.

Walking bass is, of course, no longer quite the lingua franca of jazz that it once was, but the other ways of playing could probably use some of the same spice as well. Perhaps the notion that each individual rhythm section player's part should be interesting enough to listen to in isolation while nonetheless blending seamlessly with the whole remains strong advice. As someone who is trying to catch up conceptually more so than technically when it comes to jazz bass functions, I do sometimes aurally hone in on the bass player if the band I am listening to is in a feel which I don't fully understand yet. More often than not, I find that the playing doesn't quite meet this standard, even if you'd never think complain about much of anything in the total presentation.

Everyone's Favorite Oxymoron

While I more or less rejected from the outset the idea of learning tunes solely out of professional obligation, I sense something of an impasse setting in over the last several years that makes me a bit uncomfortable. When someone calls an old standard I don't know, I still go home and look it up; the problem is that whereas I often used to be impressed enough to want to learn it, I now find myself gagging virtually every time. I don't know that many tunes, but it seems increasingly as if I know most of the ones that I care to know; such it is that the "obscure standard" remains a beguiling oxymoron.

There's so little to recommend tunes like Summer Night, I'm Old Fashioned, and the like. Even in an era of unprecedented narcissistic aping of classic jazz, they don't seem particularly necessary or even useful as foils to business as usual, at least not based solely on their relative obscurity. I would also argue that it is these tunes' very lack of "interesting" harmonic content in their original versions which seems to beget irreconcilable regional variations that can frustrate the prospective student: as best I can tell, Summer Night, for example, seems to exist in two versions, one of which goes to IV in the 7th bar, the other of which merely works its way back to I. That's not "substitution" at work so much as underdetermination, no?

To my ears, the various ways of playing the 10th bar of Alone Together are more symptomatic of inspiration, of attractive possibilities which both work well enough to capture the imaginations of the jazz community, and whose relative merits most of us wouldn't think to bicker over even if we'd agree that it's better to pick one explicitly before attempting a performance with people we don't usually play with. This variation in Summer Night, on the other hand, just sounds like a mistake, and at that, a mistake of the type that competent musicians simply don't make or accept whether they're an established band or a jam session punching bag.

It is well established that master improvisors in musical traditions the world over tend to exert their mastery over what in the jazz tradition would be considered a scandalously small repertoire of distinct pieces or forms. The lesson for modern day jazz players? Knowing 1,500 standards was a commercial venture from the start! Occasionally, it may be a voyeuristic one for the real zealots among us; but was it ever truly an artistic one? Indeed, could it ever be? Some would ask whether learning tunes is not one of the best ways for improvising instrumentalists to build vocabulary. Not necessarily, I would say, if the tunes in question are "singer tunes," i.e. "pop songs," i.e. vessels for the unencumbered delivery of lyrics in service to which the melodic and harmonic accoutrements have been purposefully pared to an unobtrusive minimum (so much so, in fact, that the recorded legacy of these tunes betrays literal ambivalence towards them as musical structures). If you play jazz in 2012, I think you have to face these questions eventually, and also realize that you can't trust anyone who writes for the International Musician or publishes jazz education materials to answer them for you. In any case, it seems to me that the road to encyclopedic knowledge of standards has become littered with half-remembered versions of unmemorable tunes, which is one of the best reasons I can think of to permit oneself to specialize just a bit.

Reinforcement

Consider this a mere prelude to a longer reflection on the topic of conditioning, but like most of us horn jocks, I'm continually fascinated/horrified at the relationship brass players have to our mistakes. It's a staple of music school lexicon that the best way to eliminate mistakes is not to practice them, but is it truly possible for a brass player not to practice their mistakes? Ever? Seems to me that no matter how hard we try, unless we are both independently wealthy and exceptionally, pathologically driven, we are going to have days where the ol' choppers simply won't cooperate, whether by virtue of over- or under-cooking the previous day(s). A day off to rest may or may not be in order depending on the particular sonic malaise, and even if it is, it may or may not result in a real live "good day" when we return. Most likely, we need to play some, if not a lot, and it's not going to sound good, i.e. it's going to be one big "mistake," or a series of them. And if we simply sit around waiting for a good day, we eliminate the very possibility, in addition to earning ourselves days or weeks of restorative maintenance filled with "mistakes." If there is a solution to be found here, it remains a mystery to me.

My grandmother, who never played professionally but had an acute musical sense, once said that what made brass entrances most exciting was the suspense surrounding the heightened potential for something to go wrong. I'm now imagining some orchestra outreach type in a sport coat and tennis shoes proffering this alongside his allegorical interpretation of sonata form as part of the hidden code of classical music listening. He might be half right.

Winter Break Stuff

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

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



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

And now for something completely different:



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

Piano Proficiency (iv)

In addition to the general excitement of working towards something new, my piano adventure presents the opportunity to explore two very interesting questions of interest to any music teacher. First off, while I'm one of those twenty-somethings who doesn't quite feel like the word "adult" legitimately applies yet, the truth is that I'm undertaking this project well after science tells us it starts to get harder for people to acquire new muscle memory. Of course, I've dabbled in keyboard technique since I was that young, but none of it was focused or consistent, so while I have some important basic skills (as well as all of my musical experience as a tuba player) to work with, I would expect that if there's something to all the talk of brain cells changing after adolescence, that I'll be facing that challenge as part of this process.

To go along with that, the truth is that while I've become motivated to practice in a way that is focused and goal-oriented rather than aimlessly noodling, I still don't have time to do it every day. I don't have a keyboard at home, and while there are places I can go to use one, making a special trip every day just isn't going to happen with everything else that's going on. Even if I did have one at home, I'm still not sure it would become a daily thing. Hence, while you could say I've been consistent, it has been on a less-than-daily basis.

I experimented on and off for about half a year with practicing tuba only every other day. It worked better than I could reasonably have expected before trying it. Part of my theory was that the extra rest would keep both my chops and mind fresher, hence enabling longer practice sessions on the days that I practiced, which would add up to something close to the total time I was practicing already. While I can't say that my technique stayed right where it was before, it certainly didn't suffer too much, and I made great progress in learning new repertoire, since I was able to focus rather intensely on it one day, and then let it percolate for an extra day before coming back to it.

For better or worse, I could never get away with this now simply because I have to play almost every day either in a rehearsal or gig, which wouldn't allow either for the day of intense practice, or the day of complete rest. However, by default, this is essentially the approach I'm taking to the piano at this point. I'll be curious to see how far I can get this way before I have to make it a daily thing.

Piano Proficiency (iii)

When I first started composing as a teen, the medium I worked in exclusively for the first several years was essentially the school band medium that I had been exposed to as a budding euphonium player. Even after I became involved in jazz as a player, it wasn't until several years later that I made my first attempts to compose in that idiom, and they were quite awkward and unsuccessful attempts, even in comparison to where my playing was at back then.

As I became more engrossed in jazz, I became more fluent as a jazz composer, and eventually spent some significant chunks of time writing only jazz compositions. Occasionally, lead sheet tunes would just come to me and I would write them down, but most of what I wrote early on had significant structural wrinkles, even if it was not truly through-composed. Coming from essentially a classical music composing background, I often had very specific ideas about how I wanted certain chords to be voiced, too specific for standard jazz notation, and certainly more specific than most players would want to put up with. In short, what this led to was either very dense harmonic structure (i.e. lots of chord symbols changing quickly), written out piano voicings and bass parts, or a combination of the two.

If I had been happy with the results, I would have persevered with this sort of concept, but eventually I became disillusioned with the results anyway, and seeing that they were, on top of everything else, rather unattractive if not downright unapproachable to many players (including myself at times), I began to think twice. My work has definitely become more polished after realizing this, and yet I still can't shake my attachment to very specific voicings, especially in the piano. In fact, even before I had a chance to play many of my tunes with real live people, I considered the piano to be the most important part of the ensemble, I had the most specific idea of how I wanted it to sound of any of the instruments in the band, and I would be apprehensive to bring in a tune of mine at all if there was no pianist in the group.

Similarly, I've often thought that if I, as the composer, could play the most important part in the band, that this would be most conducive to achieving fulfilling and accurate realizations of my tunes. That motivation to clean up my piano playing has always been there, and it remains the strongest motivation that I have. What I have been doing the past several months is mostly learning to play the tunes of mine that I feel will benefit the most from having the composer at the piano. It's quite a roundabout way to catch up on general technique, which is really what I need to do, but to be honest, the copious scale and arpeggio exercises used in traditional piano technique are the kinds of things that would make me absolutely hate to play, and given the fragile balance of circumstances that has inexplicably gotten me motivated to practice piano seriously for the first time, I feel like it's best to leave those alone.

Originally, I was a self-taught tuba player, but I can't really claim to be that anymore. I didn't have much help early on, but eventually I ended up taking quite a few lessons from a variety of tuba teachers with a variety of approaches, and while I've never changed my self-taught embouchure, most every other aspect of my tuba technique is very much by the book. I think it's safe to say that the piano is a far more intuitive instrument to learn than the tuba, and that it has a richer history of a variety of approaches, including the autodidactic, as well as those who simply do more with less. It's an instrument where I can clearly see how a traditional course of study benefits the player, and yet I can also see how the pervasiveness of that particular approach has yielded a certain amount of conformity among players, a conformity the type of which I'm inclined to avoid participating in if I can at all help it. Hence, my approach is to simply focus on learning to play what I want to be able to play, and in doing so, address the technical challenges of those particular pieces as they arise, even if that's not in order of progressive difficulty or an otherwise sensible succession of challenges that build on each other in a clear way.

The one area where I'll be forced to engage in purely technical exercises is independence. I've always felt that if I had great independence, I could do pretty much everything I want to do with the piano using just the minimal technique I already have with each hand on its own. That, however, is nowhere near the case. To this point, I've steadfastly avoided approaching anything that required even a hint of independence simply because I knew it would take longer to learn than the time I had to do it in. For now, at least, I've finally become motivated to do the grunt work required to overcome this barrier. We'll see if it actually works.

Encounters of the Very Difficult Kind

There are very few pieces in the solo tuba repertoire that are any good. There are even fewer pieces in the solo tuba repertoire that are any good that are not transcriptions. There are fewer pieces yet in the solo tuba repertoire that are any good that are not transcriptions and are written in post-tonal or "modernist" idioms. And there are even fewer pieces yet in the solo tuba repertoire that are any good, that are not transcriptions, that are written in post-tonal or "modernist" idioms, and that are for unaccompanied tuba rather than tuba with piano or large ensemble. In fact, I can only think of one, and that's William Kraft's Encounters II.

It dawned on me several months ago that if anyone should know this piece, it's me. I do, after all, aspire to be "the modernist tubist" that I've beenspecifically advised against becoming. I had bought the music years ago and never looked at it, so I had to dig it out from the bottom of the pile. While my opinion of the piece remains high, I've found it to be significantly harder than I expected...not in the typical ways, but in the most annoying ones. I've always had a knack for blurting out minor ninths in the extreme upper register and similar modernist acrobatics; my weaknesses are elsewhere, and this piece exposes all of them at once, particularly the extreme dynamics and the intricate multiphonics.

I've heard the piece performed live 3 times: once by Sam Pilafian at a summer program, once by my former teacher Jason Byrnes, and once this past summer at the most recent ITEC by Jens Bjørn-Larsen. All three made it sound easy, which no doubt accounts for a some of my shock at actually trying to learn to play the damn thing myself. This is good motivational material, as is the exposure of weaknesses in my playing, but above all, I find myself motivated to learn the piece because there seems to be a consensus that it is a good piece that just happens to be written for unaccompanied tuba in a "modernist" idiom. There aren't too many of those running around; in fact, it's tempting sometimes to wonder if the lack of certain kinds of good pieces for certain instruments doesn't have something to do with the instrument and its capabilities. Just knowing something is possible is very powerful, and while this piece is relatively short and obscure, it provides hope and a model for us Modernist Tubists.

To Read or Not To Know

I've said before that my primary justification for the low level of activity here is that it reflects how often I myself am able to set aside the time sit down and read other people's blogs (not skim through, but actually read and digest; anything else would be a waste of time). Certainly, if I had more to say, I would say it, but I find nothing unfortunate about the fact that most of the time, I don't. With writing as with music making, I value being consistent over being prolific (though I'd like to be both, I'm neither most of the time).

As with virtually every other aspect of what the web has wrought, the sheer number of music blogs seemed daunting for a long time. It is somewhat odd, then, that as I've settled into a routine of checking in with the rest of y'all quite a bit less frequently than I used to, I am now beginning to get frustrated with my inability to unearth any new blogs of substantial interest to me. Being someone who gets off on crashing parties and being an outsider, the guiding principle behind my blogospheric machinations to this point has been an idealistic optimism towards unknown quantities (i.e. blogs that don't seem to be attracting much attention) while casting a cynical eye towards the ones that are in virtually everyone's blogroll. Two years into this endeavor, it's now past time to admit that while there are indeed a good number of very popular destinations whose attraction is utterly lost on me, the vast majority of my favorite blogs have a significantly larger readership than my own blog does.

Of course, a very "popular" music blog is still not very popular in the grand scheme of things, but if nothing else, I'm heartened by the possibility that the marketplace of ideas is not only stocking something I want to buy, but selling a lot of it, too. I'm still looking forward to reading any insurgents that might crop up, but I guess it's time to stop feeling guilty for going back to the same old blogs whenever I manage to make time for reading. The more frustrating part is that it is difficult to keep up with most of them, and even if time were not an issue, I'm not convinced that I would be in the mood for the kind of conscientious reading I referred to above often enough to manage this anyway. Complain about long posts if you will; it's really no different than writing a boatload of really short posts over the same period of time (I would venture that far fewer words are posted here over a given month or year despite the length of the individual entries). Maybe by spending less time looking for enlightenment in all the wrong places, I'll be able to keep up with some of the more prolific among us.


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When I graduated from college, I realized that I didn't know anything. And I'm not talking about "street smarts" or the "real world," I'm talking about the type of "book smarts" that school is supposed to endow you with in gross excess, but which I can't help feeling that I lack spectacularly. I could go on about the structure of college music programs, but I won't because I already have, and if you're interested in what I have to say about that, you can go there and find out. All that aside, suffice it to say that I was not inspired to learn because I wasn't interested in what was being taught. The three years since then have mostly been spent shuttling between worrying about what this might mean for my career as a music maker and feebly attempting to do something about it (the latter course of action being based on the assumption that, as I was always told in school, whatever the possible consequences, they are all bad). Needless to say that reading music blogs can make one feel really smart sometimes and really dumb other times, the latter in my case most especially when the writer is an academic or specialist twice my age. As a student, I chided those people for pursuing knowledge for its own sake. "If I want to make music," I might have said to myself, "I don't have time to become a musicology expert. I have to practice."

Upon getting a safe distance from the institution, I realized that I had spent a hell of a lot of time practicing without putting an ounce of effort into knowledge gathering (again, I'm hesitant to blame myself entirely for this given that music school "knowledge gathering" was more like "knowledge stuffed down your throat depending on what will get us and keep us NASM accredited"). I fairly immediately began to thirst for knowledge, usually for its own sake and simply because I felt I didn't have any, but sometimes because I didn't think I could go on making music without it. This latter inclination would seem to validate what I heard repeatedly for 5 years as the meekest of all justifications for what I was putting myself through, and it shocked the hell out of me to imagine myself embracing it.

I have not, however, been thoroughly converted. Under my breath or in my head, I would often dare the utterer of such a phrase to back it up with a lucid, academically rigorous explanation of specifically how knowledge of the bit of extra-musical fodder under discussion would make me a better musician. Because I never said it out loud, they didn't, and I can't, hence, I'm not convinced that most of the knowledge I'm interested in will mean anything for my career other than becoming a know-it-all (not a good networking move at all, unfortunately, as this tends to alienate people like all hell).

The inconvenient part of all of this is that I have found myself to have been correct on what would seem to be the most juvenile of all things I ever thought back then, but which is turning out to be the most absolutely and frustratingly true: I really don't have time gather all of that knowledge and keep my chops in any kind of performance-ready shape at the same time. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many of those hours are inspired hours, and only so many of those hours (actually, I think we're down to a matter of minutes at this point) are hours when it's not impolite to play a tuba upstairs from a family with a small child. I'm finding it a hell of a lot harder to become a top-notch performer/composer than to become a know-it-all, but damn near impossible to become both. Given a choice, I'll take the musicianship, which, as my younger self would have said, produces something that doesn't die with me as my knowledge most certainly will.