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.

Once a Writer, Twice...??

An older friend who has earned the authority to say so tells me (paraphrasing here) that my writing is tantalizing but unpolished. Given the surfeit of mindless positivity in circulation today, I certainly appreciate the frankness and take no personal offense. I also think it is the proper assessment. In the end, though, I don't anticipate bending towards journalistic accessibility as her critique suggests, or at least not with any particular alacrity.

The task of giving concrete voice to inner thoughts must count as an abiding passion of mine by now, actions speaking loudest of all as the saying would have it. Even so, it is not and never will be an identity; definitely not a personal one, and most likely not a professional one either. For better or worse the tuba seems destined to continue in both roles until further notice. Identity being a far heavier burden than passion, the process of making peace with the externally imposed demands of professional instrumentalism¹ has been long, slow, and often tumultuous. Not too much has changed since my mother first diagnosed her 4 year-old only child as "stubborn," and so it is that the intervening three decades of psychosocial development have seen the formation and refinement of many elaborate rationalizations for this trait's oft-neglected social utility (and a few half-hearted efforts at personal reform). Tuba playing has nonetheless been the site of my most extensive and compulsory mediation with a society which lets no good deed goes unpunished; and so, having thus given over one life-consuming endeavor to such protracted mediation in exchange for an identity, the mere thought of giving over other parts of myself to this miasma is a bridge too far. Given both where this society has been it has been and where it is going, any mediation with it is destined to be an ongoing, dialectical process rather than a cleaner teleological one, heroic in a Promethean sense rather than the Spartan one that I, like most other professional brass players, would much prefer to known for. (At least I have that in common with my colleagues in the brass world. This has not always always been obvious.)

I should add that relocating to a place where I can actually make a living playing my horn has allowed me to further compartmentalize this uncompromising streak, which to say also to consolidate it. In hindsight, it's clear enough that in my twenties I was conditioned by failure on this front. The material payoff for compromise was then so meager as to not be worth the trouble, and I became less and less sure that professional instrumentalism suited me at all even as my commitment to instrumentalism more broadly construed never wavered. Nonetheless, as I type this I have turned down a grand total of two paying tuba gigs simply because I didn't want to endure them, and needless to say I've accepted dozens which I would rather not have. I remain weary of those self-styled musicians-in-the-trenches who would make such amenability into the single criterion of a classically capitalist musical meritocracy; and yet in my gut I am indeed strangely proud of my record in this department even as intellectually I will always look at such pride as irredeemably perverse and have no less trouble than ever conjuring some pretty good abstract arguments and real-life anecdotes alike to support that assessment.

As for other accounts, my lifetime earnings as a composer are not enough to buy a tank of gas, and my earnings as a writer of words are literally zero. If either state of affairs bothered me intensely enough, I would have done more about it; I've certainly been party to enough facile huckstering over the years that appropriating a few tactics here and there wouldn't be all that hard. For now I have no such inclinations. I have long suspected and now truly believe that relative to the competition I have much more to offer in these two areas than I do as a tuba player. In college I used to ponder this question as one of choosing the right career; now I'm thankful that I made the "wrong" choice back then. As long as I can survive as a tuba player, I can listen, study, and write strictly on my own terms, and I'll be at peace with this balance in a way that I never could be were the polarity reversed.

Of course in my capacity as uncompromising, rationalistic grown-up-only-child, I'm not content to stop there: I have often been left with the impression that others need me to compromise on their behalf more than they really care about bringing me along for whatever world-conquering careerist ride they have plotted out. It is invariably a ride which requires, let's say, a band of other sentient human beings, each one spontaneously grabbing a paddle and commencing to row in proper synchrony as if by magic. (This will certainly be the narrative spun later, whether or not it is the least bit true.)

Having thus gone "further," there remains the "deeper:" I sensed in the discussion which prompted this post (which was offline and one-to-one) as well as in many prior mediations something akin to so many canonical art-historical polemics: form as against content; art as against entertainment; writing for oneself as against writing for the audience; and not insignificantly, refined as against unrefined modes of expression. To wit, I decided years ago that my posture here and anywhere else I might publish my "writings" is most definitely not as a writer per se but rather as a thinker presenting thoughts via the least wretched of the many wretched avenues one has for doing so.

I'm just seasoned enough to acknowledge the puerile aspects of this sentiment, and likewise to stand by it unapologetically even so. Scholar, critic, theorist, analyst...these are at least fit to be personal identities, if not in every case professional ones. "Writer" is, besides being tainted with the stench of Hollywood pretension, too vague in one sense and too specific in another. "Prophet" meanwhile is a rather absurd and value-laden term which is used and abused in much the same vein as is "genius," but one which is thus applied quite often to people whose writerly (and musical) achievements I most admire. Rather than indicating privileged communion with an all powerful creator, it could simply mean one who speaks The Word of a given discipline from a place of great knowledge; who mediates with a body of knowledge in service of society, as opposed to the messier, joyless task of mediating with society in service of a body of knowledge as so-called professionals do. If we can ever agree upon less loaded terminology to indicate that distinction, I will happily put it into service.



1. Spell-check/autocorrect flags this word, hence it's worth clarifying that I mean it to encompass both performing and teaching. To omit the latter would implicitly deny the role it has played in sustaining me both financially and, for lack of a better word, spiritually.

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.

(Much Needed) Update to Conditioning Best Practices

A few Blog Months ago, I attempted a post on "conditioning best practices for tuba players." I just revisited it and confirmed my nagging suspicion that I've since disproved most of what I then thought to be true. After years of frustration I have only in the last several months made some real progress, progress which I suspect might age quite a bit more gracefully than it did the last time I thought I could say so. Who really knows. Again, I will offer the disclaimer that this reflects only one person's experience, and even then may cease to be relevant in short order.

The first, unfortunate, point is that I still have yet to achieve perfect interchangeability in musical results between a strictly vegan diet and one which involves occasional strategic beef loading. Two days in advance of an important playing obligation seems nearly always to be an effective time to do this. Whether this restores depleted iron and protein supplies in the body or simply provides an extra caloric boost I have no idea at this point. However, it is very real and I am now relying on it, with notable success in recent months.

Man, did I trash napping back when I wrote the other post. For whatever reason, napping has now become my choppers' best friend rather than their worst enemy, indicating that something else was fishy back in the day which for whatever reason a substantial midday nap badly exacerbated. Everyone should read Dr. William Dement's The Promise of Sleep. It has priceless information that everyone can use, like the fact that the "two-thirty feeling" is actually a natural drop in the body's built-in alerting system. (Closed-circuit to white people: this means that the siesta is actually a scientifically justifiable masterstroke of productivity, not an emblem of laziness. I am proving it.) Having claimed the 6am-2pm shift at work almost a year ago, I am finding that for me as someone who has never been able to sleep very long at a time, it is highly effective for me to basically only ever try to sleep when alerting is low, i.e. late night into early morning and early to mid-afternoon. When I have work during the day and gigs at night I sometimes end up sleeping almost an equal amount during both stretches for days at a time. Sounds awful to you, maybe, but for me it's a godsend as I never have to go straight from work to a gig or vice versa without refreshing myself.

By the end of a long day without any breaks, you simply have no energy, and what I'm coming to suspect is that looking at all of this in terms of general energy level is a much more fruitful approach than focusing on specific muscles. This is informing my eating as well. If you have seen me eat, you most likely share my disbelief that my prior struggles with conditioning could possibly have been due to insufficient caloric intake; and yet, I am paying more attention to this and it is working. I am also going out of my way to diversify my diet rather than eating so much of the same things, and while I can't say for sure that this has had any impact, it sure can't hurt. Right now I am halfway through Enette Larson-Meyer's Vegetarian Sports Nutrition and am most struck by the sheer number of nutrients that factor directly into performance athletics. In the past I probably was getting decent amounts/proportions of macronutrients but not nearly the diversity of micronutrients she outlines. I am making the effort now; it helps to be close to the nation's fruit basket, and lots of Trader Joe's locations.

You're laughing at the phrase "performance athletics" on a tuba blog? I was right there with you for a long time and the consequences nearly ruined me physically and emotionally. This leads me to probably my most disturbing recent discovery, soon to be put to the final empirical test over winter break but right now with very strong anecdotal evidence to support it, and this is that ceasing all unnecessary strenuous athletic activity (in my case, my coveted handful of trips to the basketball court each week) has made a dramatic positive difference in my tuba playing. How is this even possible? Strong aerobic conditioning is thought by many to have great benefits to wind players. For whatever it's worth, I for one have never quite been able to prove this to myself anyway; more substantively, though, I strongly suspect that this amount of strenuous exertion has simply been depleting my energy stores and that I have not been getting the right amount/kind of either food or sleep in the recovery period. There were hints of this as soon as I started paying attention, but it was too uncomfortable a conclusion; there's no way tuba playing could burn all the extra calories I've been consuming by itself, and the absence of strenuous physical activity is literally a death wish. Is this where the fat tuba player thing comes from? I hope not, but I certainly am paying close attention to all of this. Stay tuned for the results of future experiments.

Activation

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

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

At Long Last, A YouTube Presence

Copland on the tuba

"The tuba is one of the orchestra's more spectacular-looking instruments, since it fills the arms of the player holding it. It isn't easily manageable. To play it at all one must possess good teeth and plenty of reserve wind. It is a heavier, more dignified, harder-to-move kind of trombone. It is seldom used melodically, though in recent years composers have entrusted occasional themes to its bearlike mercies, with varying results. (Ravel's tuba solo in his orchestral version of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition" is a particularly happy example.) For the most part, however, its function is to emphasize the bass, and, as such, it does valuable service."

from What To Listen For In Music, p. 95

Making A Habit Of It: A Second Lapse Into Foodblogging

I now continue tumbling down the slippery slope of blogger-like behaviors with an encore foodblogging extravaganza. This year's iteration, however, bears quite a bit more directly on my musical activities than you probably would otherwise imagine. Over the past several years, I began to suspect that my largely vegan diet was not serving the needs of my choppers all that well. My first thought was protein, but I now suspect that iron has a much larger impact. The following dish was developed for iron loading, combining as it does three vegan iron powerhouses: kale, tempeh, and black beans. I eat it three times a week and have seen a noticeable improvement in my ability to get and stay in tuba shape. It's also a darn tasty and filling meal sure to please all but the most terminally constipated of fast-foodists. The recipe is shared below. Please note that most all of the measurements are approximate and included simply for effect; I do not own any measuring implements and have never actually measured anything when making this dish. Use your instincts and embrace some subtle variation within repetition. (Did I mention I eat this three times a week?)

•••••
Iron, Man!
feeds 2 people, or 1 tuba player

•1/3 Cup Canola Oil
•Two Handfuls Chopped Onions
•One Handful Chopped Garlic
•2 Tbs Ground Cumin
•1 Tbs Ground Cayenne Pepper
•One Package Trader Joe's 3-Grain Tempeh, Chopped
•One Generous Splash Bragg's Liquid Aminos
[low-sodium soy sauce substitute, available at health food type places and some supermarkets; a miracle; get hip to it if you're not)]•Two Handfuls Cherry or Grape Tomatoes, Chopped
•Lots of Kale, Chopped (I use about 3/4 of the Trader Joe's bag)
•One Can Cooked Black Beans, Drained and Rinsed
[if you have time to cook your own beans and know how to do it well, this can really put the dish over the top; unfortunately, I have been opting for the expedience of the can lately]

In a large, deep skillet or wok, combine canola oil, cumin, cayenne pepper, onion, garlic, and tomatoes. Cook on low heat for 5-10 minutes, mixing occasionally to distribute. Mix in tempeh and liquid aminos and cook for an additional 5-10 minutes.

Now add as much kale as will fit in the pan. You really can't have too much, since it cooks down so severely, but you'll be lucky to fit a whole bunch/bag in there unless you're cooking in one of those massive witches cauldrons.

If using a coverable pan, cover at this point, but do not mix. When kale first begins to wilt, uncover and mix to distribute spices and oil. Cover and cook for an additional 5-10 minutes, or until kale reaches the desired state. (If using a wok with no cover, it's possible to get more or less the same results by bringing the heat up a tad and mixing every few minutes.) Uncover, mix in black beans, remove from heat and let cool. Serve.

You're now ready for life as a bodybuilder, or an improvising tubist, whichever sounds more exciting to you.

Exit Strategies III: Documentation

Given all the blather about the before, during and after of my CalArts sojourn, you're probably wondering what, if anything, I actually did while I was there. To that end, I've added the choicest nuggets of 2012-13 to the Materials page at stefankac.com and to the corresponding sidebar here at Fickle Ears. Below, I've assembled an annotated guide, plus a couple of blog-only extras for the stalwarts among you. Enjoy.

•••••
from The "H" Series :

H-8
listen (MP3)
view score (PDF)

H-9
listen (MP3)
view score (PDF)

Stefan Kac Quintet
Elysia Strauss, soprano saxophone
Andrew Rowan, trumpet/flugelhorn
Will Wulfeck, trombone
Stefan Kac, tuba
Amir Oosman, drums

from Five Movements for Clarinet, Viola and Piano

Second Movement
listen (MP3)

Third Movement
listen (MP3)

view full score
(PDF)

CalArts New Century Players
Julia Heinen, clarinet
Morgan Gerstmar, viola
Vicky Ray, piano

•••••
I appear on two selections from the 2013 CalArts Jazz CD: Whack Stack of Mister's Sly, by Will Wulfeck, and an abridged version of The "H" Series: H-9 :

Whack Stack of Mister's Sly

Will Wulfeck Quintet
Will Wulfeck, trombone
Elysia Strauss, saxophones
Greg Uhlmann, guitar
Stefan Kac, tuba
Sean Fitzpatrick, drums



The "H" Series: H-9

Stefan Kac Quintet
(personnel as above)

•••••
For my graduation recital, I gave an unaccompanied solo tuba recital. Here is the closing "Postlude," an improvisation:

Postlude

On this recital, I also presented my first fixed-media electro-acoustic composition. Let's call it Series 0: 0-1. I have been using the free program Audacity out of a combination of choice and necessity. I'm sure there are many good reasons to aim higher in the software department, but frankly, I don't yet know what I would do with a more capable program seeing that I can't yet imagine exhausting the possibilities presented by this one. I intend to write more about this sometime in the near future. For now, enjoy this first attempt. It doesn't quite do justice to everything I'm envisioning, but the journey has been rewarding and stimulating nonetheless.

from Series 0:

0-1

Though I wrote this specifically for the recital, I was nervous about playing it back in such a live room. In the end, the room actually warmed the sound nicely and covered some of the technical deficiencies, kind of like it does with live tuba playing. Go figure.

•••••
There is much more, of course, but discretion is the better part of valor in the content-rich life. These are the documents which I feel most do justice to the work, and for that I am eternally grateful to all collaborators, teachers and crew who were involved in bringing this music to fruition. So long to grad school and hello "real" world. That you might be more real than last time we met.

Exit Strategies II: The Two Dignities

In many ways, the day jobs I have held have engaged, challenged and utilized my entire physical and intellectual capacities to a much greater extent than many of the paying tuba gigs I have played. Those prone to hawking music as the ultimate multi-disciplinary task for the developing brain will of course accuse me of exaggerating, but I'm not so sure I am. In fairness, it is true that I have invested quite a bit more time and effort in improving my tuba playing than I have in becoming a better security guard, and that this has made certain kinds of tuba gigs much easier than they would otherwise be. That being what it may, in facing the transition from academic to civilian life for the second time, I find myself far less fearful of the indignities associated with low-wage jobs than of those which inhere in the musical cultures I inhabit.

As with so many other musico-cultural issues, a disconnect with my peers is palpable when it comes to weighing these two dignities against each other. One consideration, of course, is instrumentation. I cannot demand $100 for a $50 gig where the contractor truly needs about $20 worth of tuba playing, and I struggle to take pride in imbuing that $20 worth of music with $100 execution. Of course, I understood from a relatively early stage that this is what it means to play the tuba. All of this came quite a bit more easily to me then, a time when I more readily embraced the idea that any musical task is as hard as you make it for yourself, when I enjoyed the particular challenge of being an accompanimental voice, took pride in being saved only for the biggest and best parts of the piece, and found fulfillment in doing the little things. I was constantly commended as a young adult for my "maturity" in such matters, scoffing at that evaluation with increasing frequency as neither I nor my less "mature" peers seemed to change much as we aged. With time, however, the politics of orchestration have indeed eroded my willingness to sit idly by while the bulk of the music is made without me. As the saying goes, I set out to change the the world and the world changed me instead.

By any number of measures, this is a rather petty and selfish tantrum to throw, not very zen at all, and potentially rather destructive to just the kind of collaboration that sustains creative musicians like me. And yet I don't think it can be denied that there is something profoundly unhealthy and equally un-zen-like about living one's musical life bottled up; about so rarely being necessary to the whole of which you are a part; about enduring the absolute insistence by careerist colleagues that the indignities and injustices the rest of the world suffers through on a daily basis makes the life of a $100 tuba player being paid $50 for $20 worth of work into one of the world's higher privileges. Perhaps it very well should be. For me, it is not.

By and large, tubists as a group have quite admirably taken to heart Jacobs' admonition to seek out greater challenges than our established roles present to us on a daily basis. I would, of course, agitate for casting a much wider and less stylistically conservative net throughout this process, and I have written plenty about that already. The point I want to reprise this time around is that because of this overwhelmingly conservative orientation, we have not succeeded in establishing idiomatic roles for the instrument in living contemporary musical traditions, roles which are commensurate with our newly evolved technical achievements. Instead, the emphasis has been on getting better at the roles which already exist. Neither as performer nor as listener would I want to live in a world devoid of those traditions, but nor can I say that I have much of a shot at a dignified existence within the confines of that music. Earth to tubists: we need this music more than it needs us, a surefire recipe for an unhealthy relationship in virtually any sphere of human existence.

Such it is that when the dignity of making a living through one's life's work gives way to the indignity of boredom and superfluousness, it doesn't matter how much we're getting paid to play whole notes or how beautiful those whole notes are. Raising the technical bar is only half the battle; only in applying these advances to great, living music do we ensure ourselves a share of the musical future, by which I mean the dignity of being necessary to a living musical tradition. (Quick! Somebody reading this convince me that the tuba is "necessary" to a "living" musical tradition! No, seriously, I really need to know!)

I certainly have found my way into some interesting tuba work over the years through my investment in playing changes. Perversely, that is my most marketable skill, with both competition and demand being almost non-existent. Yet by and large, the gig that absolutely needs me and my skill set just to be able to happen is a rare bird, and the more gigs I play as an interchangeable piece, the stronger I sense that there is an indignity here for me of the type I've never sensed at any day job. Of course, in the professional music world, you are supposed to be thankful that people want to hire you, period, no matter who they are and what the occasion might be, and all of that should go double when someone else could just as easily have gotten the call. "He's a great player and a swell guy to work with." The meritocrats admonish us that this is no less that the essence of dignity in our chosen profession. Where is the dignity in walking away from it?

I have already given part of the answer, but the more important part, I am only recently coming to think, has everything to do with what might be called "family values" (note lower case). Music history is of course littered with major and minor figures alike who rankled their parents by abandoning more stable, respectable, lucrative paths in order to follow their respective muses. Other aspirants are themselves rather terrified when they first fully grasp the reality of the situation they are facing and either take up a fallback career or become the most rabid of self-promoters. Still others were raised by parents who suffered true indignities of various stripes along the way, leading both them and their children to aspire to something better. It seems quite clear to me now that most of my peers have been shaped by one or more of these factors and that perhaps I am rather exceptional in not having been shaped by any of them: my career choice met little parental resistance, I was raised to fear bourgeoisification more than poverty, and economically at least, there was scarcely a better life my parents could have aspired to give me than the one we had.

As for place, it may or may not be relevant in my case:

The culture in Minneapolis is very comfortable. Our guest artists almost always comment on how much they love Minneapolis--the clubs, the scene. But they also comment on the lack of drive in local players. They're all like, 'I love it--but where's the fire behind these musicians?'

Well...there's fire, and then there's fire. There's rehearsal, practice, listening, study, diversion, and then there's hustling. There's proving something to yourself and then there's proving it to others. For whatever reason, my thing has always been outward humility and inner fire; I think that derives from an upbringing where achievement was valued, self-importance was discouraged, and basic needs were never in jeopardy of failing to be met. Meanwhile, ever since I discovered the degree of misjudgment and misinterpretation that goes on in the professional music world, as easily in one's favor as against it, it has been rather difficult to get fired up about controlling my own narrative. I decided to direct that energy into my work instead. That way dignity lies.

[sc]airquotes (iii)

"The late twenties trend toward larger groups coincided with replacing the tuba with the bass as the focal point of the rhythm section, causing many tuba players to switch instruments. As George Duvivier conjectures, however, few early tuba players 'made a successful transition to the bass, because they had nothing to guide them from a wind instrument to a string instrument.' Consequently, 'they made up for their deficiencies by slapping the bass, twirling it, and being active.'"

Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 130.

Um...LOL anyone else? This is the first time I've seen this subject tackled in a scholarly publication, albeit under the rubric of "conjecture," but I think that most of us musicians have conjectured at least a few times in our lives that Guffawing Tubist Syndrome has its roots in something other than the well-known tendency of certain instruments to attract certain kinds of people. Indeed, does the tuba not in fact have two very different such stereotypes, both of which are quite observable and not so completely localized to the different musical traditions we most readily identify them with as to permit attributing them solely to the demands of those traditions?

Part of me is just dying to know if "slapping the bass, twirling it, and being active" was an authentic reaction newly encountered technical limitations, or if it was just one of many possible responses, but the one to which tuba players as a group were disproportionately predisposed. Did young, amateurish, or otherwise unaccomplished bass players of the era who had never played tuba typically succumb to these kinds of antics? Did they learn them from players who used to play tuba? Silly even to wonder these kinds of things, I suppose, but I just can't help it having found myself in too many situations over the years where the contractor ordered a GTS tubist and got stuck with me instead.

Kind of like lead and solo trumpet, or high and low horn, there are high tuba players and then there are hiiiiiigh tuba players. It's tempting to point to this kind of thing as evidence of the continuing inertia against tuba players developing complete musicianship. In truth, I think almost every band would rather have the better player, but it is also true that personality is at least equally important in many New Orleans-style bands and touring brass quintets, and I've read job postings from both types of ensembles which made this abundantly clear, and even one several years ago which generated some heated online discussion for stating baldly that the ideal candidate would be of a certain age (i.e. young and hip). I think the more important point, though, is one independent of matters of personality or overcompensation, namely that over time when such a great number of players of a particular instrument lack technical sophistication, this in fact becomes part of the style, which means the demands on new generations of players become limited, and as Mr. Jacobs famously said, "A limited challenge produces a limited musician," thus compounding the problem. It's fascinating to ponder this through the lens of the oft-cited era of transition from tuba to bass referenced in the above quote, but with documentation being elusive, I'm afraid we're mostly stuck with the kind of conjecture Duvivier offers here, which if nothing else had me laughing quite a bit harder than most scholarly publications ever will.

Conditioning Best Practices for Tuba Player(s)

[Update 11/28/14: Wow. This entire post is garbage. Almost all of it, anyway. Sorry everyone. I really have been tied in quite the knot over this during the last several years. Things have brightened just a bit recently, and I will be publishing a brief corrective today, hopefully one which ages better than this one has as my investigations continue. I am leaving this up only for the sake of curiosity and historical accuracy.]

One of the most valuable aspects of returning to school has been the opportunity to begin a sort of empirical investigation of how to stay in tuba shape. The frenzy of my undergraduate years, which often included an inhumane amount of daily tuba playing (as often at my own behest as that of the institution) was tremendously productive in many ways, and yet because it was more or less impossible to get out of shape under those circumstances (and also because I was younger and more resilient), I left school with no reliable method or plan of attack for maintaining this level of conditioning, or even, as I realized just a few years ago, any real understanding of how conditioning works.

I hasten to clarify that I am not referring here to matters of embouchure, airstream or any other external "product" or the physical technique of producing it, but rather to the internal chemical and mechanical condition of the muscle and soft tissue surrounding the mouth which, to a greater or lesser degree depending on your level of Jacobsian mysticism, mediates one's physical ability to create those external results. I'm a long way from a thorough clinical understanding of this sort of thing, nor am I finished with my anecdotal investigation of the various factors through the more tractable lens of musical results. However, I thought it would be worth inventorying and sharing the strongest of my suspicions as they stand today. Consider this list subject to revision and highly personal.

-----

•Play for an absolute minimum of three 20 minute individual practice sessions every day. At least one should be longer and involve "feeling the burn" in your corners (i.e. where the muscles are; the center of the embouchure contains very little muscle and any pain or discomfort there is a major red flag). Two half-hour sessions at early and late hours have occasionally been sufficient, but usually not for an extended period of time, and especially not if what happens in between them is physically and/or mentally taxing.

•The most reliable way to "feel the burn" is to play music with no or very few breaks and lots of large intervals: Bach suites, jazz saxophone transcriptions, walking bass lines, running patterns and licks in all transpositions with a metronome, etc.

•"Feeling the burn" can range from working up to the point where you just begin to feel it and then stopping all the way to what I've heard weightlifters refer to as "total failure," when your muscles simply can't fire anymore. The happy zone on any given day is probably somewhere in between, so listen to what your face is telling you, not just that day but in terms of the larger patterns of how your chops have felt day by day for the preceding couple of weeks.

•Don't count rehearsal time as maintenance time unless it is so taxing that further playing that same day feels counterproductive or injurious. If this is the case, you've already given your muscles all they could handle that day.

•Space practice sessions evenly throughout the day. Don't play within an hour of your sleep: 1-2 hours after awaking is ideal; up to 4 hours before falling asleep seems tenable, though later seems to work just as well. Keep in mind that if you are a daily practicer, the longest you go without playing on a daily basis is between your evening session and the next morning; keep an eye on this time and don't let it get too terribly long one way or the other. Leave more time between your first and second practice sessions each day than between your second and third.

•At least 6 uninterrupted hours of sleep are absolutely required for a full recovery. Sleeping in shorter blocks for any amount of time is virtually useless to the muscles even if it is highly restful mentally.

•The most common interruptions are noise and nature calling. Therefore, I sleep with earplugs and limit food and drink to the extent possible after 8pm. Salt, alcohol and caffeine all will have you pissing your brains out a matter of hours later, so keep fairly dry, fatty, completely unsalted snacks handy in case you're really hungry late at night: unsalted sardines, extra firm tofu, dried fruit and nuts can be all consumed in satisfying quantities without precipitating a piss-fest. Two sips of wine a hour or two before bedtime can be relaxing; the alcohol will also dry you out a bit provided you leave enough time before sleeping for it to do its work, and it is also an appetite suppressant if you're feeling excessively snacky at an inconvenient time. Salt is just dangerous. Don't mess with it. Seriously. I cook primarily with Bragg's Liquid Aminos, which is (are?) miraculously low in sodium, and just a pinch of iodized salt here and there.

•Napping, while again often highly restful in every other way, is incredibly, gallingly destructive to the cycle of rest and recovery. My chops do not seem to differentiate between napping and sleeping: in other words, if I any more than doze off for a few minutes, it's as if I've "gone to bed" and my body hits the reset button. That is to say that if, for example, I have two practice sessions before 3pm, at which time I take a nap, awaking at 5pm, it is as if I have a new day on my hands, except (a) I had one too few practice sessions the previous day, (b) my body has not fully recovered from the previous day because I did not get at least 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep, and (c) I don't have enough time before I will be tired again to replicate a full practice day. Hence, I have essentially taken one potentially productive day and turned it into two unproductive days marked by the double-whammy of not enough sleep or practice, and two unproductive days in a row is generally four times worse than one. Further, this almost always leads to interrupted sleep for two or three more nights, which makes things even worse.

•Having said all of that, when the issue is fatigue and not underconditioning, it is likely that I will wake up from a long-ish nap with unusually loose, fresh feeling chops but very little endurance. I do this only in desperate circumstances because it tends to yield very good results in concert later that night; however, the long-term effect is similar to that described above, since you are still vastly undercooking your face and underrecovering two "days" in a row instead of one. I shudder to think how much of my life I've spent trying to get back into shape after doing this, so as miserable as it can be to be tired all day, I've started toughing it out until my normal bedtime almost no matter what.

•Eat a little bit of animal protein every day. It's clear to me now that my days as a strict vegetarian nearly ruined me. Perhaps it is possible to make this work, but I've found it much easier to simply reintroduce fish to my diet, which has lots of stuff besides protein that vegetarians don't get enough of. The rest of my current diet is very nearly strictly vegan across the board, so I'm not as concerned practically or philosophically with this single concession as I once would have been. While this was not the "magic bullet" I though it might be, it has in combination with the sleep guidelines made a significant difference in my conditioning. I began to suspect something was up years ago but couldn't confirm it. Rather, it was two separate incidents nearly a year apart which I couldn't explain, one at the tail end of a See Us Be Cute tour, the other when I moved to California last year. In both cases, the exigencies of travel meant that I (a) didn't practice much for several days, and (b) ate a ton of meat for being trapped at restaurants which didn't serve much else. In both cases, despite being completely exhausted and not in the best of spirits, I had indestructible chops two days later.

•Perhaps I simply have not mastered the craft of conditioning, but my final remark for now is that I have thus far found true consistency virtually unattainable, and in fact, even as an undergrad when conditioning per se was a non-issue and I maintained a near-fanatical devotion to routine, consistency was still a major problem. Some brass players insist that if you are consistent enough in the structure of your practice, it will translate directly to your conditioning; others maintain this is all in our heads and that if we so much as take note of how our chops physically feel, we have already lost the battle. I feel that both mindsets have let me down in a big way. My feeling has always been that there is a cycle of sorts at work; more recently, I've begun to suspect that one big piece to this puzzle which I have not yet mastered is ascertaining on a daily basis what my face needs. This probably sounds odd, but I have only recently learned to tell the difference between extreme fatigue and extreme underconditioning with a reasonable degree of accuracy: the physical sensations and musical results are remarkably similar. This is undoubtedly the source of some severe frustration in years past as it is then far too easy to mistake one for the other, which leads you to actually do the worst possible thing to your face that day. I will say that true days of rest are almost always conditioning setbacks, even if they are physically necessary to avoid injury; therefore, it becomes extremely important to avoid becoming this fatigued. Assuming this is attained, ideal conditioning seems to me to require a kind of scheduling flexibility that is almost impossible for most people, whether students, amateurs or professionals, since you have to react to subtle changes in your chops by adding or cutting practice sessions, or adjusting what you do during them and for how long. I know it's silly to get this detailed about it, but I've found the alternative terribly unsatisfying and counterproductive, and so I'm paying special attention these days to the Chop Cycle and trying different ways of gaming it to stay as strong and loose as possible. Did I mention that the parameters "strong/weak," "tight/loose," and "swollen/limber" all seem to operate independently of each other? It's quite a minefield, but I'm committed to figuring it out, hopefully sometime before my faculties start to erode from old age. To be continued...

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.

Toward a New Isolation (iv)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (iii)

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (i)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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