How Improvisation Enhances Life
The optimist says, "Life is an improvisation!"
The skeptic says, "There is no such thing!"
We can recognize a certain obvious truth in both of these seemingly contradictory statements, and without resorting to the physiological (i.e. neurological) explanation, be that line of reasoning as it may rather incontrovertible. Put more simply, the term "improvisation" is an exceedingly imprecise one: it describes only our sensation of the act, not the act itself. The "enhancement" in question, then, might be most readily schematized not by setting Improvisation and Life as x-y axes and then seeking points of optimization, but rather by considering the myriad degrees and types of improvisation we engage in; where we were and what we were doing when the act of improvisation seemed impossible; and, by the same token, when it seemed inescapable. This is the empirical approach; for a cultural analysis, substitute matters of taste for those of mere possibility in the preceding sentence.
Performing these two exercises for myself, what I find first and foremost is that improvisation is a useful foil to much "business as usual." This requires, of course, that normalcy be defined as tending toward the premeditated, which is certainly not true in every culture, but my sense is that it is true in those which I have been thrust into most often (and even if premeditation is not truly the norm, it is still, perhaps, overutilized, if not just in my humble opinion). I suppose I'll know that this is no longer a constructive viewpoint when I am being assigned to write a short reflection on "How Planning Ahead Enhances Life." I should reiterate, though, that this dynamic of contrast also exists between specific degrees and types of improvisation, perhaps more powerfully than it does between the premeditated and the spontaneous more broadly construed (overbroad categories, actually, which, as hinted at above, are not always what they seem).
Spirituality Through Sound: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony
It is crucial that I preface my explanation for choosing this piece with the fact that I knew almost nothing about it or its composer when I first heard it, and that it immediately became my "new favorite piece" in absence of any such historical perspective. Spirituality being for an agnostic like me an earthly concern with a finite duration, I think it's valid to respond to an assignment such as this with one's most favorite music, whether or not that music is particularly spiritual in some other way; after all, it is this music which is, literally, all we have to live for. This is a piece of music which I find just this compelling in the abstract, and yet the circumstances of its creation also lend it an intensely spiritual dimension.
Shostakovich had already begun composing his Fourth Symphony when the infamous Pravda article appeared (in January, 1936) condemning his work and putting his very life in danger. His work in progress was if anything more subversive of the party agenda than any which had preceded it, and though he completed it anyway and had even secured a premiere, this was canceled after "...a series of unsuccessful rehearsals clearly influenced by the new condemned standing of its composer." Shostakovich's subsequent contrition, genuine or not, was adequate to save his career (and his life), but he would never truly return to composing in the vein of the Fourth Symphony, a piece which he himself once considered a watershed in his creative development. Shelved by the political climate, the orchestral score was lost during World War II; it was only the later rediscovery of the parts from the canceled premiere that allowed the original version to be reconstructed piece by piece. The work was premiered only in 1960, 24 years after it's completion, and not published until 1984, nearly a decade after the composer's death1.
It is, in other words, a miracle that the piece exists at all. What lends this history a spiritual profundity, I think, is that it points to the transient, impermanent nature of art, and by extension, of life. The saying goes that you don't truly appreciate what you once had until it's gone, and I think that a similar dynamic exists where the object's provenance will not permit its being taken for granted, even by those who have not actually been deprived of it (and especially with the knowledge that there are many who were.)
Notes
1. Anderson, Keith, "Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43." Liner notes. Shostakovich: Symphony No, 4 in C Minor. Naxos Records, 1993.
31 October 2011
10 September 2011
Coltrane's Exercises and Excesses
Musician and blogger Truan Savage has a bee in his bonnet about John Coltrane, as evidenced by several posts on his blog, Savage Music:
The Problem With John Coltrane~~Part 1: The Audience
The Problem with John Coltrane~~Part 2: Technique
Unlearning the Learned and Thoughts on Exercises...
I don't agree with much of what he writes, but I wouldn't take the time to write a dissent of this length if I thought he was a lone wolf. Rather, I think there several issues here that come up again and again, both on- and off-line, that are thus worth chiming in on in depth. Here, then, is my unsolicited reaction.
Where Savage and I agree is that not everyone can be John Coltrane. Where the disagreement lies, I think, is in the conclusions we each draw from this. In particular, when I read the following paragraph, I felt like I was reading it for the hundredth time:
There are many problems here. To start, I don't think it's wise to speak in absolutes about musical perception. Technique as an isolable concept in the mind of the listener cannot simply be taken for granted in this way, the seeming uniformity of experience among present day jazz audiences notwithstanding. This is, however, a relatively trivial point in comparison to what follows. The most insidious part of this paragraph is the final sentence, where we encounter a very common but nonetheless most tenuous assumption, namely that the world is filled with teeming hordes of latent musical geniuses ruined by the scourge of technique, which is largely if not solely responsible for seducing them away from the vital, individualistic work they might have done in favor of the flashy, boring, derivative work that seems to dominate the landscape. This is assuming far too much. These people have nothing to say, and they would not magically find something to say if they had less technique; if anything, their lack of artistry would be even more painful to listen to. If it seems that there are more soulless technicians than middling individualists, this is because even a middling individualism is a hard-won achievement. The tree of musicianship is very tall, and for many players, technique is simply the lowest hanging fruit.
The "Problem with John Coltrane" to which Savage obliquely refers here is that Coltrane was both an eminent technician and a potent and eloquent creative artist, and that these two characteristics are inextricable in his music. He always seemed to have something to say, no matter the technique involved, and this is indeed a singular and exceptional facet of his work which the rest of us only hope we might someday achieve. Yet it is also undeniable that even his prodigious technique wasn't always adequate to realize what he had to say. For me as a player and teacher this is the more constructive, salient point and a facet of his music that is equally central, distinguishable, and powerful. It is not that Savage evinces ignorance of this; rather, he seems neurotically overburdened by it, implying that because us mere mortals will never achieve Coltrane's degree of creative potency we would be better served cutting our technical development off at the knees before the two get out of balance with each other.
I think that to demonize technique in this way because of something John Coltrane did is to sell both him and ourselves way too short. I also think it is clearer yet that to demonize it because of something his shameless imitators did is to give them way too much credit. It is a terrible waste of time to complain that subsequent generations of musicians have exhibited only those aspects of Coltrane's mastery which can be taught while remaining deficient in those which can't. This outcome is indeed frustrating, but it is also wholly predictable. It is bad enough to worry excessively about that which one cannot control, and it is worse yet to be overtaken by this anxiety and jump to the conclusion that technical and creative sophistication are essentially anathema to each other; that is, that "more often than not this preoccupation [with technique] comes at the expense of good music." The latter sentiment is one of colloquial discourse's most enduring and destructive gestures against human creativity, a complaint which is as old as time, and one which is one-hundred and ten percent false on account of a textbook conflation of correlation and causation.
Such observers as Mr. Savage are in this sense themselves "blinded by technique" more so even than the objects of their ire: they fail to see that there is no latent creative potency trapped inside all those soulless technicians, nothing their technique is inhibiting them from saying with their music. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is simply a soulless technician with nothing to say. To issue broad condemnations of technical sophistication on such grounds is to let the technique terrorists win, so to speak. As long as we don't let them, they can't; so don't, and they won't. It is that simple.
It is more easily argued that there are only so many hours in the day and hence that allocating all of them to technical development and little or none to pursuing other aspects of musicianship will cripple the musician. That is very different, though, from arguing that technical development inherently retards the development of these other facets, even when a concurrent effort is made. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that this is the case; what is more clear, to me at least, is that technique is simply apt to blossom in many players long before a commensurate musico-intellectual maturity can been reached, and that social, environmental, and developmental factors alike undoubtedly have roles to play here. A perfectly concurrent development among all aspects of musicianship is an attractive ideal for many reasons, but ultimately it is neither plausible nor particularly necessary.
But what, then, of those who, whether by dint of nature or nurture, never even out, who continue playing boring, derivative, technically astute jazz into their 30's, 40's, 50's, and 60's? Savage wrote:
Again, I would dispute the conceit that "technical development" and "musicality" are isolable, mutually dependent forces which can become out of balance with each other in a destructive way. I can only argue anecdotally, but I simply don't see or hear this the same way; there are too many players who demonstrate too many degrees and combinations of the two attributes for me to think that a surplus or deficit of one could render the condition of the other in any way predictable. Surely there are a few technicians who truly neglect to develop musically despite having the potential to do so, but this tells us more about them than it does about John Coltrane.
-----
Aside from Coltrane the saxophonist, there is the question of Coltrane the composer, also addressed by Savage on his blog, and also, in my estimation, misjudged therein. Regarding Giant Steps and its myriad musical and musico-social implications, Savage argues that musicians play the tune more to show off than because they (or anyone else) actually wants to hear it. I lack the requisite omniscience to evaluate this assertion. I do, however, refuse to accept the supposed smoking gun here, namely that Coltrane himself as well as others around him considered tunes like Giant Steps and Moment's Notice to be "exercises." On this point, Savage writes:
This is a very troublesome sentence, with a lot hinging on what exactly "approach" means in this context. I suspect Savage is referring here not to the technical approach to learning, practicing and performing the tunes, but rather to their place in the pantheon, the weight they carry socially among musicians, and the frequency with which they are played. And that would imply he believes that we take this music too seriously, a profoundly counterproductive view.
At the very least, Coltrane thought enough of these compositions to record them once, but if that doesn't settle anything, neither does the "exercise" label. Classical composers like Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartók and Ligeti certainly were able to write great music even while consciously and overtly addressing some central technical or pedagogical issue. It would be an utter shame, just as I'd argue it would be with Giant Steps or Moment's Notice*, for this music to be dismissed sound unheard simply because the composer has intentionally imbued it with a utilitarian quality and was unafraid of reflecting this fact in the title of the work. In any case, the world certainly would be a much less interesting place if all the exercises, etudes, and inventions were suddenly outlawed from concert performance.
For someone so troubled by dry technical displays, Savage here reveals a peculiar blindness to one of their overarching causes: it is precisely when exercises are not taken seriously as artworks that they are reduced to this level. There is little pedagogical dispute that the ideal way to practice even the driest of materials, such as scales and arpeggios, is expressively**, meaning making intentional use of a variety of dynamics, articulations, tones, meters and tempos. Giant Steps no less than any other lead-sheet-style composition can be performed mechanically or it can be performed expressively; the challenge of making music over a formulaic structure can be accepted, met, constructively subverted, and so on, or it can simply be evaded. Savage himself notes the repetitive nature of Coltrane's own Giant Steps solo; are we to simply "approach" the changes this way for all time, hiding behind the supposition that Coltrane didn't take his own composition seriously enough to bother making music with it? This is absurd. We not only should take every interpretive challenge seriously, we must. The consequence of an irreverent "approach" to musical material is precisely the consequence Savage (and I) would prefer to avoid.
In the end, Savage is as entitled to his own aesthetic judgments as anyone else and the fact that he obviously thinks less of this tune as music than I do is irrelevant. I can respect anyone's informed judgment that Giant Steps is not a great enough composition to warrant being played as often as it is; I could even make the argument myself. I personally happen to like it enough to remain thoroughly perplexed at the vitriol it can elicit from the blogosphere, and while I'd always like to hear it played better, or differently, I wouldn't ever think to bemoan the frequency with which it's played.
To become truly overplayed, a tune needs to do more than facilitate gratuitous technical display; there are myriad jazz compositions which can be abused in this way, but few of them attain the status that Giant Steps has. The archetypal jam session tune has to have more going for it, combining manageable structural features (say, a short form and simple melody) and wide exposure (say, the title track from an iconic record by a major figure) with some wrinkle that makes it unique and tedium-combatting (say, changes that move around a circle of major thirds rather than a circle of fifths). Viewed through this lens, Giant Steps, like Solar, So What, St. Thomas, Song For My Father, Killer Joe, and so on, was simply made for jam sessions; you could even argue that it fills a niche therein. For these reasons (besides the fact that I actually, for some odd reason, like the tune), it just doesn't bother me that people play it a lot at sessions. That's something that it's good for; we might as well use it.
-----
Finally, a couple of necessary disclaimers. First, it's possible that I simply haven't been given the opportunity to learn to hate Giant Steps and Moment's Notice the way others obviously have: for one thing, there are no jam sessions in Minneapolis, and for another, if anyone there plays Giant Steps, they sure don't do it in public. The last time I can recall hearing it played live by a locally-based musician was around 10 years ago, and that was at a performance. Hence, I'm not particularly well-qualified to pass judgment on others who have been beaten over the head with it, though if all it took for them to reach that conclusion was hearing it at a jam session one too many times, I doubt they ever had much of a predilection for it anyway. (Secretly, I still think Girl From Ipanema, Bemsha Swing, and Solar are great tunes even though they're overplayed and I'm thus hesitant to call them.) The upside? You heard it here first: if you hate Giant Steps that much, move to Minnesota! I promise you'll never hear it again. Even if we had jam sessions, we're way too passive-aggressive to ever call it: "Well, I was going to call Giant Steps, but how about Blue Monk instead?"
[Update 4/7/16: Commenter Dan, whose musicianship and earnestness I can vouch for based on offline encounters, quickly chimed in to relate a different experience of our hometown. Of course there are sessions in the Twin Cities, but not like there are in Los Angeles, where the adult hobbyists at the monthly Blue Whale jam would shred 90% of the "pros" back home. I meant my original comment about the Twin Cities only in the sense that the Germans once succeeded in saddling England with the label Das Land ohne Musik. Even today, as an alumnus of Jazz Ahead, of Joe LaBarbera's and Darek Oles' combos at CalArts, and of too many high-powered original groups to list, I am mildly intimidated by the Whale sessions. They are that good. Conversely, after Brilliant Corners closed (i.e. over decade ago, when I was barely old enough to drink), I never found another regular session in Minnesota that was on my level. As for the few I did attend subsequently out of hubris or self-torture, I was being honest about what I heard, or didn't.]
Second, I play tuba, not saxophone. Giant Steps is not a fait accompli for my instrument, it hasn't exactly been overplayed by tubists, and I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to hack through it from time to time that a self-respecting saxophonist probably shouldn't. The DJA post I linked to above includes the following outburst, which points to the crux of the matter:
On a different day with the wind blowing in a different direction, I could have written that myself. However, it is far less true of my instrument's (non-)tradition any day of the week than it is of DJA's, and I think this largely accounts for our difference in perspective. I don't know that changing the instrumentation of a warhorse and leaving everything else intact should count as "something we haven't heard done a million times before," but if I seem to be implying that it should, this is part of the reason. Certainly I have hardly ever heard myself succeed at playing Giant Steps, and this provides motivation to return to it periodically. Playing melodic eighth note lines clearly at any tempo above quarter=250 is still a real challenge for me, regardless of the changes, and frankly, I'd agree that the Giant Steps changes themselves are not among the most difficult. (Much more difficult to learn from a changes standpoint, even at its more moderate tempo, was a tune like 26-2, where the sequence is occasionally fudged.) I wouldn't bother, though, if I didn't like the tune, nor would I bother with blues, Rhythm, or Impressions changes if I didn't also find each of those structures to offer something vital and pleasurable. Is the 12-bar blues merely "overplayed," or has it rather "stood the test of time?"
By the same token, if anyone reading this comes away with the impression that I worship irrationally at the altar of technique, it's because as a tuba player, my efforts to both assimilate and create roles for the instrument in music in which it does not traditionally participate are constantly hemmed in by insufficient technique, and as such, I view a high level of technical achievement as a necessity. If I show up to a jazz jam without it and someone calls something fast, even a two-chord tune, I literally have to pack up my horn and go home. I've done it before. You'd think I'd be even more alienated than the rest of you based on that kind of experience, but I'm not; really I just want to be a full participant in jazz music and culture, and that means meeting the challenge head-on, not evading it. Far from skewing our perspective, I actually think this allows those of us who play "non-standard" jazz instruments to see the role of technique more clearly than those who inherit the weight of the saxophone or piano traditions the moment they start playing. These traditions are models of clarity which a tuba player can never hope to fully match; far from just being discouraging, this enables us to proceed uninhibitedly in refining our technique, secure in the knowledge that no saxophonist or pianist will ever go on their blog and accuse us of being technically overdeveloped.
One teacher of mine defined technique as control, which I think sums it up well: when we control what comes out of our horns, the world is our musical oyster. Facility without control is just a parlor trick; it's the difference between always producing a "correct" sound and always producing the sound you intended to produce. This has absolutely nothing to do with who can play higher, faster or louder, and everything to do with whose intent is expressed most clearly. I for one don't feel that I could ever be too good at the latter, and that we disavow the pursuit of this ideal at our own peril.
*IMHO, Moments Notice, formulaic as it may be, is an entirely different case, a minor masterpiece, hardly overplayed, and utterly undeserving of being dragged through the mud here.
**I would argue for substituting "intent" for "expression," but that's a subject for a future post. In the interest of clarity, I've used the more widely accepted term for the musical phenomenon I was referring to.
The Problem With John Coltrane~~Part 1: The Audience
The Problem with John Coltrane~~Part 2: Technique
Unlearning the Learned and Thoughts on Exercises...
I don't agree with much of what he writes, but I wouldn't take the time to write a dissent of this length if I thought he was a lone wolf. Rather, I think there several issues here that come up again and again, both on- and off-line, that are thus worth chiming in on in depth. Here, then, is my unsolicited reaction.
Where Savage and I agree is that not everyone can be John Coltrane. Where the disagreement lies, I think, is in the conclusions we each draw from this. In particular, when I read the following paragraph, I felt like I was reading it for the hundredth time:
"An inherent characteristic of Coltrane’s flurrying technique is that it is distracting. That does not need to be a negative property, but unfortunately the legacy that Coltrane sowed through his masterful ability can indeed be distracting in the worst way. Players today have become blinded by technique, and more often than not this preoccupation comes at the expense of good music."
There are many problems here. To start, I don't think it's wise to speak in absolutes about musical perception. Technique as an isolable concept in the mind of the listener cannot simply be taken for granted in this way, the seeming uniformity of experience among present day jazz audiences notwithstanding. This is, however, a relatively trivial point in comparison to what follows. The most insidious part of this paragraph is the final sentence, where we encounter a very common but nonetheless most tenuous assumption, namely that the world is filled with teeming hordes of latent musical geniuses ruined by the scourge of technique, which is largely if not solely responsible for seducing them away from the vital, individualistic work they might have done in favor of the flashy, boring, derivative work that seems to dominate the landscape. This is assuming far too much. These people have nothing to say, and they would not magically find something to say if they had less technique; if anything, their lack of artistry would be even more painful to listen to. If it seems that there are more soulless technicians than middling individualists, this is because even a middling individualism is a hard-won achievement. The tree of musicianship is very tall, and for many players, technique is simply the lowest hanging fruit.
The "Problem with John Coltrane" to which Savage obliquely refers here is that Coltrane was both an eminent technician and a potent and eloquent creative artist, and that these two characteristics are inextricable in his music. He always seemed to have something to say, no matter the technique involved, and this is indeed a singular and exceptional facet of his work which the rest of us only hope we might someday achieve. Yet it is also undeniable that even his prodigious technique wasn't always adequate to realize what he had to say. For me as a player and teacher this is the more constructive, salient point and a facet of his music that is equally central, distinguishable, and powerful. It is not that Savage evinces ignorance of this; rather, he seems neurotically overburdened by it, implying that because us mere mortals will never achieve Coltrane's degree of creative potency we would be better served cutting our technical development off at the knees before the two get out of balance with each other.
I think that to demonize technique in this way because of something John Coltrane did is to sell both him and ourselves way too short. I also think it is clearer yet that to demonize it because of something his shameless imitators did is to give them way too much credit. It is a terrible waste of time to complain that subsequent generations of musicians have exhibited only those aspects of Coltrane's mastery which can be taught while remaining deficient in those which can't. This outcome is indeed frustrating, but it is also wholly predictable. It is bad enough to worry excessively about that which one cannot control, and it is worse yet to be overtaken by this anxiety and jump to the conclusion that technical and creative sophistication are essentially anathema to each other; that is, that "more often than not this preoccupation [with technique] comes at the expense of good music." The latter sentiment is one of colloquial discourse's most enduring and destructive gestures against human creativity, a complaint which is as old as time, and one which is one-hundred and ten percent false on account of a textbook conflation of correlation and causation.
Such observers as Mr. Savage are in this sense themselves "blinded by technique" more so even than the objects of their ire: they fail to see that there is no latent creative potency trapped inside all those soulless technicians, nothing their technique is inhibiting them from saying with their music. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is simply a soulless technician with nothing to say. To issue broad condemnations of technical sophistication on such grounds is to let the technique terrorists win, so to speak. As long as we don't let them, they can't; so don't, and they won't. It is that simple.
It is more easily argued that there are only so many hours in the day and hence that allocating all of them to technical development and little or none to pursuing other aspects of musicianship will cripple the musician. That is very different, though, from arguing that technical development inherently retards the development of these other facets, even when a concurrent effort is made. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that this is the case; what is more clear, to me at least, is that technique is simply apt to blossom in many players long before a commensurate musico-intellectual maturity can been reached, and that social, environmental, and developmental factors alike undoubtedly have roles to play here. A perfectly concurrent development among all aspects of musicianship is an attractive ideal for many reasons, but ultimately it is neither plausible nor particularly necessary.
But what, then, of those who, whether by dint of nature or nurture, never even out, who continue playing boring, derivative, technically astute jazz into their 30's, 40's, 50's, and 60's? Savage wrote:
...only the most masterful musicians are tastefully capable of balancing endless technical development with musicality. Today, unfortunately, players, listeners and critics alike are much too concerned with technical ability than quality output, and it is because of the success and misunderstanding of Coltrane’s restlessness that this has occurred.
Again, I would dispute the conceit that "technical development" and "musicality" are isolable, mutually dependent forces which can become out of balance with each other in a destructive way. I can only argue anecdotally, but I simply don't see or hear this the same way; there are too many players who demonstrate too many degrees and combinations of the two attributes for me to think that a surplus or deficit of one could render the condition of the other in any way predictable. Surely there are a few technicians who truly neglect to develop musically despite having the potential to do so, but this tells us more about them than it does about John Coltrane.
Aside from Coltrane the saxophonist, there is the question of Coltrane the composer, also addressed by Savage on his blog, and also, in my estimation, misjudged therein. Regarding Giant Steps and its myriad musical and musico-social implications, Savage argues that musicians play the tune more to show off than because they (or anyone else) actually wants to hear it. I lack the requisite omniscience to evaluate this assertion. I do, however, refuse to accept the supposed smoking gun here, namely that Coltrane himself as well as others around him considered tunes like Giant Steps and Moment's Notice to be "exercises." On this point, Savage writes:
If more young musicians approached these songs the way Coltrane himself clearly approached them, perhaps it would alter the trajectory of much of their music in a positive way."
This is a very troublesome sentence, with a lot hinging on what exactly "approach" means in this context. I suspect Savage is referring here not to the technical approach to learning, practicing and performing the tunes, but rather to their place in the pantheon, the weight they carry socially among musicians, and the frequency with which they are played. And that would imply he believes that we take this music too seriously, a profoundly counterproductive view.
At the very least, Coltrane thought enough of these compositions to record them once, but if that doesn't settle anything, neither does the "exercise" label. Classical composers like Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartók and Ligeti certainly were able to write great music even while consciously and overtly addressing some central technical or pedagogical issue. It would be an utter shame, just as I'd argue it would be with Giant Steps or Moment's Notice*, for this music to be dismissed sound unheard simply because the composer has intentionally imbued it with a utilitarian quality and was unafraid of reflecting this fact in the title of the work. In any case, the world certainly would be a much less interesting place if all the exercises, etudes, and inventions were suddenly outlawed from concert performance.
For someone so troubled by dry technical displays, Savage here reveals a peculiar blindness to one of their overarching causes: it is precisely when exercises are not taken seriously as artworks that they are reduced to this level. There is little pedagogical dispute that the ideal way to practice even the driest of materials, such as scales and arpeggios, is expressively**, meaning making intentional use of a variety of dynamics, articulations, tones, meters and tempos. Giant Steps no less than any other lead-sheet-style composition can be performed mechanically or it can be performed expressively; the challenge of making music over a formulaic structure can be accepted, met, constructively subverted, and so on, or it can simply be evaded. Savage himself notes the repetitive nature of Coltrane's own Giant Steps solo; are we to simply "approach" the changes this way for all time, hiding behind the supposition that Coltrane didn't take his own composition seriously enough to bother making music with it? This is absurd. We not only should take every interpretive challenge seriously, we must. The consequence of an irreverent "approach" to musical material is precisely the consequence Savage (and I) would prefer to avoid.
In the end, Savage is as entitled to his own aesthetic judgments as anyone else and the fact that he obviously thinks less of this tune as music than I do is irrelevant. I can respect anyone's informed judgment that Giant Steps is not a great enough composition to warrant being played as often as it is; I could even make the argument myself. I personally happen to like it enough to remain thoroughly perplexed at the vitriol it can elicit from the blogosphere, and while I'd always like to hear it played better, or differently, I wouldn't ever think to bemoan the frequency with which it's played.
To become truly overplayed, a tune needs to do more than facilitate gratuitous technical display; there are myriad jazz compositions which can be abused in this way, but few of them attain the status that Giant Steps has. The archetypal jam session tune has to have more going for it, combining manageable structural features (say, a short form and simple melody) and wide exposure (say, the title track from an iconic record by a major figure) with some wrinkle that makes it unique and tedium-combatting (say, changes that move around a circle of major thirds rather than a circle of fifths). Viewed through this lens, Giant Steps, like Solar, So What, St. Thomas, Song For My Father, Killer Joe, and so on, was simply made for jam sessions; you could even argue that it fills a niche therein. For these reasons (besides the fact that I actually, for some odd reason, like the tune), it just doesn't bother me that people play it a lot at sessions. That's something that it's good for; we might as well use it.
Finally, a couple of necessary disclaimers. First, it's possible that I simply haven't been given the opportunity to learn to hate Giant Steps and Moment's Notice the way others obviously have: for one thing, there are no jam sessions in Minneapolis, and for another, if anyone there plays Giant Steps, they sure don't do it in public. The last time I can recall hearing it played live by a locally-based musician was around 10 years ago, and that was at a performance. Hence, I'm not particularly well-qualified to pass judgment on others who have been beaten over the head with it, though if all it took for them to reach that conclusion was hearing it at a jam session one too many times, I doubt they ever had much of a predilection for it anyway. (Secretly, I still think Girl From Ipanema, Bemsha Swing, and Solar are great tunes even though they're overplayed and I'm thus hesitant to call them.) The upside? You heard it here first: if you hate Giant Steps that much, move to Minnesota! I promise you'll never hear it again. Even if we had jam sessions, we're way too passive-aggressive to ever call it: "Well, I was going to call Giant Steps, but how about Blue Monk instead?"
[Update 4/7/16: Commenter Dan, whose musicianship and earnestness I can vouch for based on offline encounters, quickly chimed in to relate a different experience of our hometown. Of course there are sessions in the Twin Cities, but not like there are in Los Angeles, where the adult hobbyists at the monthly Blue Whale jam would shred 90% of the "pros" back home. I meant my original comment about the Twin Cities only in the sense that the Germans once succeeded in saddling England with the label Das Land ohne Musik. Even today, as an alumnus of Jazz Ahead, of Joe LaBarbera's and Darek Oles' combos at CalArts, and of too many high-powered original groups to list, I am mildly intimidated by the Whale sessions. They are that good. Conversely, after Brilliant Corners closed (i.e. over decade ago, when I was barely old enough to drink), I never found another regular session in Minnesota that was on my level. As for the few I did attend subsequently out of hubris or self-torture, I was being honest about what I heard, or didn't.]
Second, I play tuba, not saxophone. Giant Steps is not a fait accompli for my instrument, it hasn't exactly been overplayed by tubists, and I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to hack through it from time to time that a self-respecting saxophonist probably shouldn't. The DJA post I linked to above includes the following outburst, which points to the crux of the matter:
in case you hadn't realized (because you were too busy practicing) -- lots of people can and do play the shit out of this stuff. I don't care if you are even more flawless and even more polished than the currently reigning heavyweight champion of polished flawlessness, this stuff is just not impressive anymore. Even if your sole objective as a musician is to blow us away with your l33t skillz, the only way you can actually accomplish that is by doing something we haven't heard done a million times before.
On a different day with the wind blowing in a different direction, I could have written that myself. However, it is far less true of my instrument's (non-)tradition any day of the week than it is of DJA's, and I think this largely accounts for our difference in perspective. I don't know that changing the instrumentation of a warhorse and leaving everything else intact should count as "something we haven't heard done a million times before," but if I seem to be implying that it should, this is part of the reason. Certainly I have hardly ever heard myself succeed at playing Giant Steps, and this provides motivation to return to it periodically. Playing melodic eighth note lines clearly at any tempo above quarter=250 is still a real challenge for me, regardless of the changes, and frankly, I'd agree that the Giant Steps changes themselves are not among the most difficult. (Much more difficult to learn from a changes standpoint, even at its more moderate tempo, was a tune like 26-2, where the sequence is occasionally fudged.) I wouldn't bother, though, if I didn't like the tune, nor would I bother with blues, Rhythm, or Impressions changes if I didn't also find each of those structures to offer something vital and pleasurable. Is the 12-bar blues merely "overplayed," or has it rather "stood the test of time?"
By the same token, if anyone reading this comes away with the impression that I worship irrationally at the altar of technique, it's because as a tuba player, my efforts to both assimilate and create roles for the instrument in music in which it does not traditionally participate are constantly hemmed in by insufficient technique, and as such, I view a high level of technical achievement as a necessity. If I show up to a jazz jam without it and someone calls something fast, even a two-chord tune, I literally have to pack up my horn and go home. I've done it before. You'd think I'd be even more alienated than the rest of you based on that kind of experience, but I'm not; really I just want to be a full participant in jazz music and culture, and that means meeting the challenge head-on, not evading it. Far from skewing our perspective, I actually think this allows those of us who play "non-standard" jazz instruments to see the role of technique more clearly than those who inherit the weight of the saxophone or piano traditions the moment they start playing. These traditions are models of clarity which a tuba player can never hope to fully match; far from just being discouraging, this enables us to proceed uninhibitedly in refining our technique, secure in the knowledge that no saxophonist or pianist will ever go on their blog and accuse us of being technically overdeveloped.
One teacher of mine defined technique as control, which I think sums it up well: when we control what comes out of our horns, the world is our musical oyster. Facility without control is just a parlor trick; it's the difference between always producing a "correct" sound and always producing the sound you intended to produce. This has absolutely nothing to do with who can play higher, faster or louder, and everything to do with whose intent is expressed most clearly. I for one don't feel that I could ever be too good at the latter, and that we disavow the pursuit of this ideal at our own peril.
*IMHO, Moments Notice, formulaic as it may be, is an entirely different case, a minor masterpiece, hardly overplayed, and utterly undeserving of being dragged through the mud here.
**I would argue for substituting "intent" for "expression," but that's a subject for a future post. In the interest of clarity, I've used the more widely accepted term for the musical phenomenon I was referring to.
09 September 2011
Location
I am now located in Valencia, CA where I'll be working towards an MFA in the Performer-Composer program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), as well as playing outdoor basketball in January (awesome).
05 August 2011
02 July 2011
The New Traditionalist Critique?
The following recent comments from two respected older jazz musicians both level an accusation towards jazz academia that I find somewhat surprising.
First, here's drummer Ralph Peterson interviewed by pianist George Colligan:
Next, here's a passage from an article by bassist Chuck Israels:
What we're accustomed to hearing, of course (or at least I am), is not that universities fail to impart style to their jazz students, but that this is, to a fault, all that they do, churning out soulless virtuosic clones in the process. A certain conformity among academically trained jazz players is indeed observable (and in many ways unfortunate), but I'm less convinced than I once was that this is particularly avoidable, or that it is in any way unique to the academic environment. As Peterson says, players with similar influences can (and should, and often do) arrive at distinctive personal styles nonetheless; I do think, though, that this presupposes a certain breadth of influences, as well as a generally staunch work ethic, and I'd say that these two characteristics are typically in short supply, not just among college music majors, but among most communities of musicians I've interacted with across many styles and career paths. Hence, in my mind, putting it all on the academics isn't entirely fair. These considerations, along with its malleability to so many different agendas, make the "clone" critique too easy to level, glossing over more substantive issues. To that end, the present accusations would seem to raise the possibility that this old trope, whether it's legitimate or not, has finally gotten under the academics' skin, and that they've (over)reacted accordingly. Are schools really feeling increased pressure to deliver more individualists and fewer stylists? Is this creating a scorched-earth mentality in jazz academia? Or are these two musicians just blowing smoke? I'm intrigued without being encouraged.
Both statements are rather severely worded, appealing to the notion of pressure or coercion. (Peterson: "All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style." Israels: "Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied 'real time' search for 'what to play'"). Without specific examples, I'm left to guess who might be doing the pushing and where they teach, but I will say that this strikes me as a very unlikely critique of jazz education, not only in my direct experience, but also in what I've been able to glean second hand from peers who attended different schools than I did. When we vent about our schooling, it's not about having been forbidden to have models, but rather about having had them prescribed for us. Israels argues against this, saying that, "A poor model is better than none...Get a grip, any grip; then move on to a firmer one." This is a refreshingly pluralistic statement, and on those grounds alone, I'm on board. However, the bigger topic under discussion here isn't stylistic pluralism, but rather the merits of establishing a single, pervasive model at an early stage of musical development. I'm less comfortable with this idea for a variety of reasons, some philosophical, and others personal.
My own number one critique of jazz education has always been its poverty of style-neutral pedagogical discourse; put another way, that the study of improvisation is only ever approached through the lens of particular styles (usually bebop) and never the other way around. Though I respect and agree with allowing students to choose which players or styles they might organize their study of jazz around, I disagree that improvisation cannot also be profitably studied abstractly or autonomously, and I don't think it's far-fetched to suggest that jazz students might benefit immensely from at some point being made to confront the practice of improvisation unburdened by their study of particular jazz styles or players. I consider improvisation to be roughly, if not perfectly, analogous to technique, and just as one's breathing or lip flexibility won't develop beyond an elementary stage without occasionally being isolated from the myriad other things one has to think about when performing, so too one's general improvisational technique can and should be isolated if it is to be developed to its fullest potential.
My purpose here is not necessarily to insist that the "frenzied real time search for what to play" is a viable performance strategy, nor even that it is, strictly speaking, a logical possibility, and I'll leave more specific hashing out of the nature of thought and the inescapability of influence to the neuroscientists and philosophers. My point is simply that attempting such a thing can be usefully informative about the state of one's own playing, thought and identity, and when done in the practice room rather than on stage, it can't possibly hurt anything. An art which stubbornly refuses to so much as entertain the occasional "romantic illusion" is one which I want no part of. One certainly could argue that style is inescapable, yet I'd say that I've learned the most about myself as an improvisor by finding out what happens when I try to escape it anyway. Don't just tell me that I'm bound to fail; I want to know how and why. This is invaluable information for a musician to have about themselves, and students shouldn't be discouraged from attempting to ascertain it.
I spout a fair quantity of abstract philosophical speculation in this space, but on this issue, my opinion is overwhelmingly informed by my own experiences. Having now been out of college longer than I was in, it's more apparent to me than ever that I've gained the most from intense study of a small amount of material over longer periods of time, and little-to-nothing from the opposite; but I also feel that my earliest such efforts created too many blind habits and not enough flexibility (again, the consequences of approaching improvisation solely through the lens of style; if only I'd understood it better). I'm particularly troubled by Israels' "favorite musician" standard, as this represents an even narrower band of influence than that which I engaged with at this stage. This was a time when, like many teen musicians, I'd only recently had my musical awakening, and the impact of having located "the real shit" meant that I fawned over virtually anything I heard. Once I'd heard a lot more music, though, this fawning subsided and I had a real problem, namely that my playing had grown up around models which were no longer as important to me as they had once been.
I've truly disavowed very little over the years, but even so, the impact of one's first influences can be all-encompassing, and even slight changes of taste later on can create crises of identity. This is more or less my story. All of this was magnified considerably when I became interested in non-jazz improvisational musics, but by that time, I was already fighting, if not yet winning, the battle. An overbearing teacher pushing me to sound more original would have been superfluous because I was, rightly or wrongly, strongly predisposed to play that role for myself. I was fortunate not to have too many run-ins with overbearing traditionalists either, and where they did occur, they were less run-ins that directly affected my academic standing than they were of the off-handed-codgerly-remark-in-a-masterclass variety.
There are many facets of my musical education which experience has since suggested might have been more productively undertaken working backwards from what conventional wisdom dictates. The stylization question is at the top of this list. To return for a moment to the technique analogy, one would never tell a student that "a poor model is better than none" with regard to general instrumental technique because poor habits must ultimately be unlearned, and they are harder to break than they are to develop. Perhaps the analogy to stylization is not a perfect one, but my own ongoing process of unlearning much of my earliest stylistic conditioning has made me wish a thousand times over that I had focused on more broadly applicable improvisational skills as a teen and saved deeper study of players and styles for later, when I really knew what I wanted, and when my ability to develop stylistic fluency without relying on blind physical habits was more fully developed. (Whereas Israels twice uses the word "habits" favorably, it has always been a jazz ed bugaboo in my book.) It is, of course, completely subjective what constitutes a "poor" model stylistically, and less so (though, I hasten to add, not entirely) what constitutes a poor model technically, and that's where the analogy breaks down; all I'm saying is that when I was 17, I had no idea that my own stylistic orientation might change, and under those circumstances, it has proven imprudent to grasp at the lowest hanging stylistic fruit. This is why I like to say that stylization is an advanced topic, not a beginning or intermediate one.
I've written recently about the mass disavowals of jazz among twenty-something peers, which I'm not convinced should be taken as an indictment of either jazz generally or its academic manifestations specifically, but which I am convinced is an observable trend which demonstrates the unlikeliness that your favorite musician when you're 18 will still be your favorite musician when you're 22. Settling on a stylistic orientation (or a constellation of them) is an unpredictable long-term process, and one which it could be argued that the attentive and driven musician never truly completes. In any case, to venture far enough down this path to attain even a transient stability requires a breadth of listening and study that most undergraduates won't manage to acquire before graduating. (In my case, having this forced on me by musicology professors rather than being left to my own devices sapped my very will to undertake it, and I've only recently recovered). If there's a good chance you haven't yet heard or even heard of your "favorite musician," then it's too early to invest disproportionately in imitation of a convenient model that you might not hold in such high regard shortly thereafter. Many students will suffer through this process, as I did, and survive more or less in one piece; I'm not convinced, though, that it is either ideal or unavoidable.
What else to say, then, about Israels' dissatisfaction with young players not being able or willing to name a favorite musician than that the very idea becomes increasingly untenable as one's breadth of listening experience accumulates, the best work of great artists therein coming to stand in equally high relief not only from the work of less accomplished contemporaries, but also from the bulk of their own output. Shostakovich is one such gloriously uneven composer: he wrote one of my five favorite pieces of music, but only two of my fifty favorite and probably not three of my hundred favorite. Were I to bump into Professor Israels in the hallway, Wayne Shorter would be my gun-to-the-head answer (probably after some throat clearing), both in terms of my overall attraction to his music and also time spent studying his style; yet his work is also uneven, perhaps moreso than some of the other candidates, and it doesn't really serve anyone's purposes to deny that. I think that the scale on which purposeful musical assimilation operates is much smaller than that of the Favorite Musician: rather, particular records or tunes, even particular moments in particular performances of particular tunes, are what we're really after. If "romantic illusions" about jazz are indeed to be avoided, then academia certainly should cultivate a willingness to judge case-by-case rather than constructing shrines. (Shit, even traditionalists have dirty words for people who indiscriminately worship a brand name.)
I'll close with a more personal reason I'm not comfortable naming a favorite, which is that the particular strain of wild-eyed idolatry that prevailed for many years among followers of Parker, Coltrane and others makes me very uneasy. From Phil Woods' forgery to Jon Faddis' soul patch to whoever started this nonsense about bebop being "the music of the future," no one has made it more difficult for my generation of jazz students to have "musical heroes" than those members of the older generations who have taken their own hero worship to such irrational, destructive, narcissistic heights. Seriously, guys, if this is a problem at all, it's on you and not on us. You showed us all the wrong ways to have heroes; forgive us, then, for being nonplussed when you ask us to name ours.
First, here's drummer Ralph Peterson interviewed by pianist George Colligan:
GC: How important is it to have musical heroes?
RP: I think if you don’t know how to play like somebody else first, you can never arrive at what somebody can identify as your own style. That’s another problem with what’s going on right now. All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style.
GC: Before they are ready.
RP: I’m telling you…. they ain’t got no fucking style. I don’t have no fucking style. My style is copying the style of the people I love and the way I combine it and that’s nothing more.
GC: But it has come out as your own identifiable style?
RP: Yeah, the way I combine these musical things is not going to be the way you combine them, even if we study the same guy’s playing.
Next, here's a passage from an article by bassist Chuck Israels:
Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of "original thought" is the most fraudulent and destructive element in the institutionalized process of jazz education. Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied "real time" search for "what to play", resulting in frustration for the student and the audience. The usual result is awful gibberish which ought to be embarrassing to all parties but which seems to be not only condoned but encouraged by those jazz educators who misunderstand the process of improvisation.
What we're accustomed to hearing, of course (or at least I am), is not that universities fail to impart style to their jazz students, but that this is, to a fault, all that they do, churning out soulless virtuosic clones in the process. A certain conformity among academically trained jazz players is indeed observable (and in many ways unfortunate), but I'm less convinced than I once was that this is particularly avoidable, or that it is in any way unique to the academic environment. As Peterson says, players with similar influences can (and should, and often do) arrive at distinctive personal styles nonetheless; I do think, though, that this presupposes a certain breadth of influences, as well as a generally staunch work ethic, and I'd say that these two characteristics are typically in short supply, not just among college music majors, but among most communities of musicians I've interacted with across many styles and career paths. Hence, in my mind, putting it all on the academics isn't entirely fair. These considerations, along with its malleability to so many different agendas, make the "clone" critique too easy to level, glossing over more substantive issues. To that end, the present accusations would seem to raise the possibility that this old trope, whether it's legitimate or not, has finally gotten under the academics' skin, and that they've (over)reacted accordingly. Are schools really feeling increased pressure to deliver more individualists and fewer stylists? Is this creating a scorched-earth mentality in jazz academia? Or are these two musicians just blowing smoke? I'm intrigued without being encouraged.
Both statements are rather severely worded, appealing to the notion of pressure or coercion. (Peterson: "All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style." Israels: "Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied 'real time' search for 'what to play'"). Without specific examples, I'm left to guess who might be doing the pushing and where they teach, but I will say that this strikes me as a very unlikely critique of jazz education, not only in my direct experience, but also in what I've been able to glean second hand from peers who attended different schools than I did. When we vent about our schooling, it's not about having been forbidden to have models, but rather about having had them prescribed for us. Israels argues against this, saying that, "A poor model is better than none...Get a grip, any grip; then move on to a firmer one." This is a refreshingly pluralistic statement, and on those grounds alone, I'm on board. However, the bigger topic under discussion here isn't stylistic pluralism, but rather the merits of establishing a single, pervasive model at an early stage of musical development. I'm less comfortable with this idea for a variety of reasons, some philosophical, and others personal.
My own number one critique of jazz education has always been its poverty of style-neutral pedagogical discourse; put another way, that the study of improvisation is only ever approached through the lens of particular styles (usually bebop) and never the other way around. Though I respect and agree with allowing students to choose which players or styles they might organize their study of jazz around, I disagree that improvisation cannot also be profitably studied abstractly or autonomously, and I don't think it's far-fetched to suggest that jazz students might benefit immensely from at some point being made to confront the practice of improvisation unburdened by their study of particular jazz styles or players. I consider improvisation to be roughly, if not perfectly, analogous to technique, and just as one's breathing or lip flexibility won't develop beyond an elementary stage without occasionally being isolated from the myriad other things one has to think about when performing, so too one's general improvisational technique can and should be isolated if it is to be developed to its fullest potential.
My purpose here is not necessarily to insist that the "frenzied real time search for what to play" is a viable performance strategy, nor even that it is, strictly speaking, a logical possibility, and I'll leave more specific hashing out of the nature of thought and the inescapability of influence to the neuroscientists and philosophers. My point is simply that attempting such a thing can be usefully informative about the state of one's own playing, thought and identity, and when done in the practice room rather than on stage, it can't possibly hurt anything. An art which stubbornly refuses to so much as entertain the occasional "romantic illusion" is one which I want no part of. One certainly could argue that style is inescapable, yet I'd say that I've learned the most about myself as an improvisor by finding out what happens when I try to escape it anyway. Don't just tell me that I'm bound to fail; I want to know how and why. This is invaluable information for a musician to have about themselves, and students shouldn't be discouraged from attempting to ascertain it.
I spout a fair quantity of abstract philosophical speculation in this space, but on this issue, my opinion is overwhelmingly informed by my own experiences. Having now been out of college longer than I was in, it's more apparent to me than ever that I've gained the most from intense study of a small amount of material over longer periods of time, and little-to-nothing from the opposite; but I also feel that my earliest such efforts created too many blind habits and not enough flexibility (again, the consequences of approaching improvisation solely through the lens of style; if only I'd understood it better). I'm particularly troubled by Israels' "favorite musician" standard, as this represents an even narrower band of influence than that which I engaged with at this stage. This was a time when, like many teen musicians, I'd only recently had my musical awakening, and the impact of having located "the real shit" meant that I fawned over virtually anything I heard. Once I'd heard a lot more music, though, this fawning subsided and I had a real problem, namely that my playing had grown up around models which were no longer as important to me as they had once been.
I've truly disavowed very little over the years, but even so, the impact of one's first influences can be all-encompassing, and even slight changes of taste later on can create crises of identity. This is more or less my story. All of this was magnified considerably when I became interested in non-jazz improvisational musics, but by that time, I was already fighting, if not yet winning, the battle. An overbearing teacher pushing me to sound more original would have been superfluous because I was, rightly or wrongly, strongly predisposed to play that role for myself. I was fortunate not to have too many run-ins with overbearing traditionalists either, and where they did occur, they were less run-ins that directly affected my academic standing than they were of the off-handed-codgerly-remark-in-a-masterclass variety.
There are many facets of my musical education which experience has since suggested might have been more productively undertaken working backwards from what conventional wisdom dictates. The stylization question is at the top of this list. To return for a moment to the technique analogy, one would never tell a student that "a poor model is better than none" with regard to general instrumental technique because poor habits must ultimately be unlearned, and they are harder to break than they are to develop. Perhaps the analogy to stylization is not a perfect one, but my own ongoing process of unlearning much of my earliest stylistic conditioning has made me wish a thousand times over that I had focused on more broadly applicable improvisational skills as a teen and saved deeper study of players and styles for later, when I really knew what I wanted, and when my ability to develop stylistic fluency without relying on blind physical habits was more fully developed. (Whereas Israels twice uses the word "habits" favorably, it has always been a jazz ed bugaboo in my book.) It is, of course, completely subjective what constitutes a "poor" model stylistically, and less so (though, I hasten to add, not entirely) what constitutes a poor model technically, and that's where the analogy breaks down; all I'm saying is that when I was 17, I had no idea that my own stylistic orientation might change, and under those circumstances, it has proven imprudent to grasp at the lowest hanging stylistic fruit. This is why I like to say that stylization is an advanced topic, not a beginning or intermediate one.
I've written recently about the mass disavowals of jazz among twenty-something peers, which I'm not convinced should be taken as an indictment of either jazz generally or its academic manifestations specifically, but which I am convinced is an observable trend which demonstrates the unlikeliness that your favorite musician when you're 18 will still be your favorite musician when you're 22. Settling on a stylistic orientation (or a constellation of them) is an unpredictable long-term process, and one which it could be argued that the attentive and driven musician never truly completes. In any case, to venture far enough down this path to attain even a transient stability requires a breadth of listening and study that most undergraduates won't manage to acquire before graduating. (In my case, having this forced on me by musicology professors rather than being left to my own devices sapped my very will to undertake it, and I've only recently recovered). If there's a good chance you haven't yet heard or even heard of your "favorite musician," then it's too early to invest disproportionately in imitation of a convenient model that you might not hold in such high regard shortly thereafter. Many students will suffer through this process, as I did, and survive more or less in one piece; I'm not convinced, though, that it is either ideal or unavoidable.
What else to say, then, about Israels' dissatisfaction with young players not being able or willing to name a favorite musician than that the very idea becomes increasingly untenable as one's breadth of listening experience accumulates, the best work of great artists therein coming to stand in equally high relief not only from the work of less accomplished contemporaries, but also from the bulk of their own output. Shostakovich is one such gloriously uneven composer: he wrote one of my five favorite pieces of music, but only two of my fifty favorite and probably not three of my hundred favorite. Were I to bump into Professor Israels in the hallway, Wayne Shorter would be my gun-to-the-head answer (probably after some throat clearing), both in terms of my overall attraction to his music and also time spent studying his style; yet his work is also uneven, perhaps moreso than some of the other candidates, and it doesn't really serve anyone's purposes to deny that. I think that the scale on which purposeful musical assimilation operates is much smaller than that of the Favorite Musician: rather, particular records or tunes, even particular moments in particular performances of particular tunes, are what we're really after. If "romantic illusions" about jazz are indeed to be avoided, then academia certainly should cultivate a willingness to judge case-by-case rather than constructing shrines. (Shit, even traditionalists have dirty words for people who indiscriminately worship a brand name.)
I'll close with a more personal reason I'm not comfortable naming a favorite, which is that the particular strain of wild-eyed idolatry that prevailed for many years among followers of Parker, Coltrane and others makes me very uneasy. From Phil Woods' forgery to Jon Faddis' soul patch to whoever started this nonsense about bebop being "the music of the future," no one has made it more difficult for my generation of jazz students to have "musical heroes" than those members of the older generations who have taken their own hero worship to such irrational, destructive, narcissistic heights. Seriously, guys, if this is a problem at all, it's on you and not on us. You showed us all the wrong ways to have heroes; forgive us, then, for being nonplussed when you ask us to name ours.
11 June 2011
T.K.O. in Gamers vs. Audiophiles
Yesterday, I discovered that the local Radio Shack (in the poor neighborhood) no longer stocks plain old headphones. Instead, they exclusively carry "headsets" with a single earpiece and a microphone for speaking. While the pictures on the packaging show smiling young women in phone banks, it can safely be inferred that the target market for these devices is, in fact, young male gamers, who apparently now outnumber headphone users to such an extent that the more specialized devices are no longer worth stocking.
A trip to a nearly equidistant Radio Shack (in the cake-eater neighborhood) was more successful as customers there have their choice of several sets of headphones ranging from $14.99 to $99.99 (as well as the same selection of headsets located in a completely different part of the store). Since I seem to destroy these things regardless of quality or price, I opted for the bottom-of-the-barrel set, which is something musicians aren't suppose to do (or at least not publicly admit to doing), but in my world, harmony and counterpoint are the cake, everything else is the icing, and Grainger and Ravel are booo-ring.
An aside: a techie acquaintance chides me for shopping at Radio Shack in the first place, a chain which he says "sold out" to lowest-common-denominator consumerism years ago (indeed, as I found, it's an ongoing process). I'm a musician, not an electrician; record stores, jazz clubs and bandmates are entities capable of selling out, but electronics stores are not. When I need a piece of gear, I need it fully assembled and functional, not in raw component form, and I'm pretty much at the mercy of other people/entities who can provide such services. For reasons I won't go into, I've boycotted Target and Best Buy for years, and I have to assume that Wal-Mart is a nonstarter for anyone reading this, as it is for me. Chances are better that I simply don't know about Radio Shack's dirty laundry than that they have none; anyone out there got the goods and want to force me to become a headphone-maker? (Yeah, I'm sure it's all slave labor anyway...any American-made headphones out there?)
A trip to a nearly equidistant Radio Shack (in the cake-eater neighborhood) was more successful as customers there have their choice of several sets of headphones ranging from $14.99 to $99.99 (as well as the same selection of headsets located in a completely different part of the store). Since I seem to destroy these things regardless of quality or price, I opted for the bottom-of-the-barrel set, which is something musicians aren't suppose to do (or at least not publicly admit to doing), but in my world, harmony and counterpoint are the cake, everything else is the icing, and Grainger and Ravel are booo-ring.
An aside: a techie acquaintance chides me for shopping at Radio Shack in the first place, a chain which he says "sold out" to lowest-common-denominator consumerism years ago (indeed, as I found, it's an ongoing process). I'm a musician, not an electrician; record stores, jazz clubs and bandmates are entities capable of selling out, but electronics stores are not. When I need a piece of gear, I need it fully assembled and functional, not in raw component form, and I'm pretty much at the mercy of other people/entities who can provide such services. For reasons I won't go into, I've boycotted Target and Best Buy for years, and I have to assume that Wal-Mart is a nonstarter for anyone reading this, as it is for me. Chances are better that I simply don't know about Radio Shack's dirty laundry than that they have none; anyone out there got the goods and want to force me to become a headphone-maker? (Yeah, I'm sure it's all slave labor anyway...any American-made headphones out there?)
04 June 2011
Blogging The Spare Parts
Here's a doodle that grew into a sketch and stumbled haphazardly to quasi-completion:
Prelude for Three
Listen (MP3)
Download Score (PDF)
This is perhaps the only kind of music I can write pretty much on command, and when I'm in between projects and sit down to brainstorm for the next one, this is usually the first thing that comes out. I often keep the sketches but rarely ever end up using them; there isn't often enough material from which to build a substantial piece, and it's too damn pretty anyway. I've long maintained split musical personalities (classical/jazz, written/improvised, tonal/atonal) that operate in relative ignorance of each other at least as often as they cross-polinate, but it sometimes surprises me even so that I might produce something myself that would be, like this little trinket, likely to bore me to death if someone else had written it. I suppose that's why I've summarily tacked an ending on it and moved on rather than going for broke; and yet, there's definitely an attraction here, enough at least that I'm not completely ashamed to make it public when it could have, with less effort, been buried in the oblivion of my hard drive. Considering its brevity and the paucity of actual music that I post here, though, the oblivion of this blog seems the more appropriate one.
Though I folded in this instance, I increasingly find myself seeking to redeem such materials by subjecting them to "virtuosic" development, which represents an unlikely about face in some ways. In my younger days, I believed in an idea of "pure" inspiration whereby the very distinction between material and development was impossible to make. I still find this "improvising to paper" approach to suit my needs in many cases, but I certainly appreciate large-scale development more than I did previously. Here, I guess, is yet another of those balancing acts so typical of creative disciplines.
Finally, I wonder about potential practical uses for such neo-tonal miniatures. There is a dire need for educational music that introduces, for lack of a better way of putting it, "20th Century" musical content in a technically accessible way, and while there's nothing much here approximating what I would consider to be dissonance, the chromaticism would present interesting challenges (reading and hearing alike) to young players who have just learned their chromatic scales, as well as to more advanced players of transposing instruments who are learning to read in concert pitch. Finding K-12 educators interested in prioritizing these topics can be elusive, though, and so I'm not rushing to find a publisher.
Prelude for Three
Listen (MP3)
Download Score (PDF)
This is perhaps the only kind of music I can write pretty much on command, and when I'm in between projects and sit down to brainstorm for the next one, this is usually the first thing that comes out. I often keep the sketches but rarely ever end up using them; there isn't often enough material from which to build a substantial piece, and it's too damn pretty anyway. I've long maintained split musical personalities (classical/jazz, written/improvised, tonal/atonal) that operate in relative ignorance of each other at least as often as they cross-polinate, but it sometimes surprises me even so that I might produce something myself that would be, like this little trinket, likely to bore me to death if someone else had written it. I suppose that's why I've summarily tacked an ending on it and moved on rather than going for broke; and yet, there's definitely an attraction here, enough at least that I'm not completely ashamed to make it public when it could have, with less effort, been buried in the oblivion of my hard drive. Considering its brevity and the paucity of actual music that I post here, though, the oblivion of this blog seems the more appropriate one.
Though I folded in this instance, I increasingly find myself seeking to redeem such materials by subjecting them to "virtuosic" development, which represents an unlikely about face in some ways. In my younger days, I believed in an idea of "pure" inspiration whereby the very distinction between material and development was impossible to make. I still find this "improvising to paper" approach to suit my needs in many cases, but I certainly appreciate large-scale development more than I did previously. Here, I guess, is yet another of those balancing acts so typical of creative disciplines.
Finally, I wonder about potential practical uses for such neo-tonal miniatures. There is a dire need for educational music that introduces, for lack of a better way of putting it, "20th Century" musical content in a technically accessible way, and while there's nothing much here approximating what I would consider to be dissonance, the chromaticism would present interesting challenges (reading and hearing alike) to young players who have just learned their chromatic scales, as well as to more advanced players of transposing instruments who are learning to read in concert pitch. Finding K-12 educators interested in prioritizing these topics can be elusive, though, and so I'm not rushing to find a publisher.
28 May 2011
Operating in the Affirmative
IDENTITY
As a music student, I grew up with two contradictory pieces of advice which I was never able to reconcile. On one hand, as a future teacher, I was cautioned that one should always give advice in the affirmative; in other words, that telling a student "Do this!" was preferable to saying "Don't do that!" Nevertheless, "Don't sound like a tuba!" has been a staple of music school lexicon for my generation, most especially regarding the transcription of repertoire that predates the instrument, but by no means only in this case. This advice happens to be worded in a fashion that goes against the prevailing wisdom of contemporary educational psychology, but that is hardly its most problematic aspect. Rather, it seems to assume that anything which is idiomatic to the tuba itself is inherently undesirable, or perhaps even that there is no such idiom in the first place. By this logic, those of us who play the tuba are mired in a perpetual state of imitation which precludes not only a consummation of our instrument's true artistic potential and identity, but ultimately our own as well.
Arnold Jacobs famously remarked that, “The challenge of an accompanying instrument is a limited challenge and develops a limited musician,”1 and encouraged tubists to use music originally written for other orchestral instruments as a means of attaining greater artistry. This, of course, should continue to be something that all instrumentalists task themselves with; rather, it is the idea that this process must be undertaken in order to mask the inherent deficiencies of the tuba that is an outmoded one. After all, something must be idiomatic to the tuba, but the challenge in forging these statements is primarily conceptual, not technical, and Jacobs’ admonition is no less true in the former area than the latter. It is this greater conceptual challenge of consummating the tuba’s identity (as opposed to the more limited one of evading it) that simply necessitates artistic and pedagogical frameworks dealing in the affirmative, frameworks which have been notably slow to materialize relative to recent progress in virtually every other facet of tuba playing (to say nothing of contemporary musical thought as a whole).
For the sake of comparison, consider the staggering variety of effects obtainable on string instruments, including the ability to imitate other orchestral voices. It is nonetheless difficult to imagine a string teacher telling a student, "Don't sound like a violin," even though there are markings, such as flautando, which more or less say just that. What's remarkable about this particular term? For one thing, it is specific and unambiguous in locating the object of imitation; it is also given, as every teacher knows it should be, in the affirmative; but most importantly of all, the instruction flautando was not imposed on the violin from the outside, but rather refers to an effect that is both idiomatic to and relatively easily obtainable on the instrument. Because tubists envy violinists for so many simpler reasons, it is unlikely that the privilege to be provided a clearly stated sonic reference point without the accompanying divestment of identity so characteristic of the tuba world has made many tubists’ lists, but it is at the top of mine. Our somewhat more limited (though by no means fatally so) sonic palette makes it awfully tough to beat string players at their own game, and so the obvious pedagogical value of pursuing this kind of imitation on tuba must not lead us to view it as an end unto itself. This is, ideally, a process of trial and error which ultimately reveals more about the tuba than it does about the object of imitation, the value of the experimental journey therein trumping that of the imitative destination and affirming rather than denying our unique identity and value.
NEW MEDIA
The artistic contributions of the great 20th Century player-pedagogues whose teachings now comprise the mainstream of tuba pedagogy were frequently imitative. The obvious explanation for this is that adequate solo repertoire for the tuba simply did not exist in their time, leading players to rely heavily on transcriptions, and therefore, to overtly imitate other instruments in the interest of authenticity. I would argue that there is more to it than that, though, starting with the question of instrumental advocacy. Compared with other musicians, tuba players have long been disproportionately concerned with changing minds and overcoming stereotypes about their instrument and those who play it. Did I not think this was in some sense a worthy endeavor, I would not have taken the time to write such a lengthy reflection on it. I do believe, however, that as harmless as this aspiration might be as one facet of a larger artistic vision, it becomes extremely problematic in an all-encompassing role as the tubist's raison d'être.
The efficacy of instrumental advocacy being mediated almost entirely by the sheer number of people it is able to reach, any musical product that sells poorly is inherently incompatible with it. Indeed, because unfamiliar musical styles tend to be an even tougher sell than unfamiliar media, astute instrumental advocates tend to avoid pushing the musical envelope at all costs, hoping instead that their (novel) horns might ride the coattails of their (pedestrian) programming. Such it is that tuba players’ pathological preoccupation with advocating for their instrument has mediated their artistic decision making substantially towards the conservative end of the spectrum, and that not even recent technical advances have succeeded in eroding their galling contentedness with this low-brow musical purgatory. But does the instrument, novel as it remains to many, not simply demand stylistic innovation? Does stylistic innovation not simply necessitate new media? Are these two ventures not inherently symbiotic artistically, regardless of whether they are successful commercially? History certainly would suggest so.
Of course, as the greater landscape of artistic-versus-commercial polemics goes, The Case of the Middlebrow Tuba Recital hardly registers. (There are, of course, many commonalities here with the entire brass world, but even taken together, we comprise only a tiny corner of the musical universe.) It is, however, a particularly unfortunate example on account of the possibilities it has left untapped, possibilities on which tubists hold an enviable monopoly. Consider that more recent innovations in new media (particularly the personal computer) have been said to be bringing about a “democratization of creativity” through increasing affordability and ease of use. If you make your living creating, this is good for society and bad for business; tubas, however, are still expensive to acquire and difficult to master, and it is hard to imagine either of these conditions changing substantially or quickly enough to create an overabundance of skilled tuba playing the same way digital technology has made mere hobbies of more than a few formerly lucrative vocations. Newspapers and compact discs die slow, painful deaths, the postmodern era we live in elicits constant complaints that everything has already been done, and yet it remains so obvious to so many of us who play it how much has not been done with the tuba! The other creatives would want to kill us if they knew we were dallying with the likes of Alec Wilder and Léo Delibes while we could have been forging the next musical epoch before anyone else saw it coming.
It is high time for our hyper-sycophantic tuba culture to rethink placing such disproportionate emphasis on convincing idiot savant in-laws, blue-haired churchgoers and stylistic-purist colleagues that we are worth the air we breathe. I do not apply the term “new media” as mere hyperbole, for the void that negation culture has created also presents an unparalleled opportunity for contemporary tubists. Yet while the various possibilities dangle, the artistic vacuum of instrumental advocacy feeds back on itself. Many tubists and a few sympathetic outsiders who grew up with this culture developed understandable fondness for the players and works which shaped it. Some of their students inherit this fondness through no fault of their own. Instrument-specific organizations, conferences and festivals sprout up, serving primarily as outlets for the peddling of negation culture wares and premature celebrations of organizational history. The outcome, paradoxically, is an affirmation of negation, an overwhelmingly backward-looking embrace of the specific players and works that helped the tuba take its first baby steps towards the limelight, albeit dressed up variously as a flute, violin or cello.
While it would be foolish to dismiss and forget this work outright, it would be a worse tragedy for the story to end here. Imitation of other instruments will always be part of tuba playing, as it is part of mastering most any instrument, but the ultimate goal must always be to sound like a tuba, even (or perhaps especially) if that means playing the tuba in a way that no one ever has. Future generations of tubists must not be allowed to believe that the greatest thing they can accomplish is to sound like something they are not. We will continue to imitate all kinds of things in the interest of musical growth, but we must not be afraid to form our own idiomatic statements, and consequently, an identity based on sounding like ourselves rather than like something else. This is where negation culture and instrumental advocacy have failed us, and also where future generations of tubists can and must make their greatest contributions.
DIRECT PATHS
Any musician seeking to identify what exactly it was that got them “hooked” on music in the first place in hopes of reproducing that effect on their own audiences is bound to discover a process which lays bare the curious and awkward relationship between self-discovery and externally-imposed learning like few other areas of musico-pedagogical inquiry can. For many, this is wholly or partially a matter of developing a theory of causality between music and the emotions, an area of musicological discourse which, even among professionals, is dominated by a colloquial imprecision unbefitting one of Western musical thought’s great unresolved polemics. Nowhere is this more counterproductive than in pedagogical matters, where such flawed logic can be propagated in the minds of future generations of musicians (and in the case of formal academic training, subsequently held over their head for a grade). A renewed focus on direct paths to musicianship is in order, one which rightly denies the feasibility of reverse engineering music’s emotional impact, and instead deals wholly in terms of its root cause: namely, sound.
That different listeners may experience unique emotions during the same musical presentation is well-documented. This is not merely an unavoidable fact but also an essential form of biodiversity in any musical ecosystem without which the collective creative ferment of society would become dull and monotonous, and as such, this diversity is to be celebrated, not lamented. Yet many otherwise well-intentioned efforts in the area of music appreciation continue to treat it as a pathology, assuming instead that the ultimate goal of music education and outreach is to educate listeners into behaving alike rather than enabling each one of them to “find their own voice.” (Trite as it is, this latter phrase, so often applied to music-makers but never, ever to listeners, really must to attain this broader currency if such outreach is to succeed in any meaningful way). There are many artistic and pragmatic reasons why such efforts have very low success rates, but their ignorance of (if not outright hostility toward) the diversity of their audience tops the list. Instead, I would argue that we must proceed not as if widely well-received pieces of music are those pieces which many people have learned to like, nor as if they are pieces which particularly strongly suggest or impose a certain listening style, but instead see them as music which appeals to the greatest total number of unique individual listening styles.
As with the question of musical emotion itself, though, this is a framework and not a model. Indeed, such modes of thinking most appropriate to the workaday business of a life in music are not usually good recipes for the creative process itself, heartily resisting reverse engineering for this purpose. The universally loved piece of music, hence, is the ultimate red herring in our hyper-diverse musical culture, one which many artists pursue nonetheless only to find themselves headed in the opposite ethical direction from that in which they initially intended to proceed. The desire for mass appeal is the only force in the universe both powerful and insidious enough to mitigate humanity’s collective aesthetic diversity in favor of the dullest conformity, leading the work of artists of wildly diverse backgrounds and circumstances to converge upon a staggeringly tiny set of outcomes. This is why one cannot simply equate the accessible with the altruistic, nor the esoteric with the nihilistic, for ultimately, the more artists who pursue the same recipe for mass appeal, the more similar their work becomes, and the fewer total listeners they serve. The artist who creates music that anyone could have made robs the world of the music that only they could have made. If musicians have a moral obligation to the world, it is not to procure the largest possible audience for themselves, but rather to meet those unmet musical needs that only they can meet. That means following their muse even when nobody else follows them.
To this end, the physical, sonic phenomena which are ultimately responsible for any emotional content one might ascribe to music are best dealt with directly rather than obliquely. As just one element of musical appeal, whether widely shared or highly contentious, “emotion” per se cannot be dealt with generically. The range of possible emotions is too great, and most every conceivable emotion has been reported as a response to music by someone at some point. It should follow from this realization that musicians cannot learn to emote musically simply by emoting generically; there must be a more direct path. The challenge here lies in striking a productive balance between the conscious and subconscious in order to develop an informed fluency that is equal parts flexible and reliable.
One must be immediately suspicious of any musico-pedagogical approach that bypasses the conscious mind too greatly. On one extreme, there is so-called “playing by feel,” a prominent example of which is the application of descriptive terms to musical phrases in order to elicit a certain musical result from the student without helping them to recognize and understand the technical factors at play. The other extreme is the “trained monkey” phenomenon, where a physical task is simply repeated ad nauseum until it becomes a habit or reflex rather than a consciously executed action. Both methods facilitate strong results only when applied to a relatively narrow range of demands, and both severely limit the student’s adaptability to unfamiliar musical settings, most especially on short notice. A pedagogy better suited to consummate the student’s musical individuality rather than stifling it would deploy such extreme measures only in proportionally extreme situations, otherwise opting for the direct path of developing technique through imitation, adaptability through variation, and creativity through subversion. The exceedingly general, even trite, nature of this approach is not its weakness but rather its strength, as it is thus applicable to a broad range of musical styles rather than just one or two, and therein affords the student greater opportunity to personalize their technique.
Success in this realm is achieved first and foremost by putting aside (if not just for a moment) any sedimented emotional, literary and functional associations that have been imposed on musical works from the outside, and instead concerning oneself wholly with (1) inventorying and analyzing cherished sonic experiences one wishes to have inform their playing, and (2) developing the ability to both recreate and vary them at will using one’s instrument. Students should have as much say as possible as to which ingredients get added to their musical melting pot. This ensures maximum emotional investment in the process by enabling them to create music which reflects their identity, not just that of their teacher or institution. Musicians who are inclined and empowered from an early age to engage with a wide rather than a narrow range of musical styles will ultimately find greater fulfillment and create more compelling work.
In order to achieve any particular result, the student first must consciously understand how it is achieved. While the teacher should use whatever means necessary to elicit the desired sonic results from the student when such sounds are new or unfamiliar, it is crucial that the student ultimately come to understand what made these results possible on a technical level, and that they leave lessons armed with as many relevant approaches for reinforcing such newly acquired skills as the teacher can provide. Where this information is communicated clearly, the student is enabled to take ownership of their development, ultimately becoming their own best teacher.
Varying amounts of repetition must be used to adjust how conscious the student is of their newfound technique, the degree to which it is applied always being a function of the student’s particular musical ends and the given technique’s role in them (fundamental or interpretive; highly internalized or highly intentional). It is lamentable that brass players in general tend to be notably intolerant of variation from traditional technical approaches, a situation which will continue to retard their collective artistic progress if not appropriately relaxed among future generations. While many brass students will undoubtedly continue to choose the traditional approach to their instruments, students who wish to fruitfully problematize any facet of it should be engaged on their own terms, and no fundamental technique should be off limits to constructive scrutiny.
Physical, sonic phenomena must be the unit of currency in any economy of musico-pedagogical ideas. Subjective emotion being an effect of such phenomena and not a cause, it tells us very little about how a performer might create or recreate a musical moment. By opting for the more direct path to musicianship, students can acquire the knowledge and ability to consciously and purposely realize musical intent and therein make contributions to music and the world that are bigger than themselves. Insofar as desired emotional responses to music are ultimately caused by sound, pedagogy must concern itself first and foremost with nurturing the student's ability to intentionally create sound using their instrument. Hence, rather than leaving students grasping for sonic equivalents to their unique emotions, teachers must ask students to (1) identify the sonic characteristics which lend a given performance its perceived emotional qualities, (2) imitate and vary these devices, and (3) apply the personalized devices to their performances as they deem appropriate. This is first and foremost a creative endeavor, akin to composing or improvising: the ultimate goal is not merely to "paint by number" by compiling an inventory of devices to be drawn upon one at a time without variation, but instead to synthesize this sonic inventory into a unique, personal voice that is never manifested the same way twice.
TONE AND TIME
In his 1967 essay "The Tonal Ideal of Romanticism," musicologist Edward Lippman makes a compelling case that the related qualities of “vagueness” and “blending” were characteristic and intentional elements of much nineteenth century classical music. Many of the composers Lippman singles out as especially important exponents of this aesthetic are the very same composers who first made frequent and effective use of the tuba and its predecessors, thereby validating and solidifying its place in the modern orchestra. In turn, much of this music continues to loom large in the world of orchestral tuba playing, most notably that of Wagner, whose personal theater was built with an especially long reverberation time and a hood covering the recessed orchestra pit, and of Bruckner, who, in Lippman’s words, “takes as a model the diffused and collective unity of the organ.”2
Both facets of Lippman’s romantic tonal aesthetic ought to be of interest to tuba players, though for different reasons. “Fusion, or blending” refers to the treatment of the orchestra as a unified timbral whole rather than a disparate collection of voices. This obfuscation of differences of color among the instruments resulted in large part from the previously unprecedented freedom with which romantic-era orchestrators mixed them, and the advent of the tuba could certainly be seen as furthering this aim by providing a true bass voice which was not only timbrally versatile enough to anchor both the conical and cylindrical brass sections separately, but also to unify them with each other when needed. However, it is the second characteristic, “vagueness,” on which I want to focus.
Ours, of course, remains among the most problematic instruments in the modern orchestra as far as directional clarity of sound is concerned, and so there is a special irony for tuba players in Lippman’s characterization of the era (“Hey, that’s our era!”) as not merely tolerating but in fact desiring a tonal “lack of definition.” Compositional necessity is a sexier raison d’être than tonal vagueness, but if Lippman is correct in citing the latter as a significant and intentional aesthetic choice among romantic era musicians, one wonders if our horns were not in fact birthed out of both concerns, if not necessarily in equal parts.
Whether or not there is any merit to such speculation, the idea that the tuba might reflect or even embody ideas and events larger than itself (indeed, to hear Lippman tell it, larger than music as well), is tantalizing in a way, for it is just this sort of inextricable link with historically significant modern music (and, where relevant, the broader world of art and ideas behind it) which can ensure an instrumental culture’s vitality for decades, if not centuries. And while compositional necessity was undoubtedly a greater force behind the advent of the tuba, there is no reason to view the kind of connection I am describing as achievable only at an instrument’s birth, nor only out of the most urgent artistic necessity (the saxophone’s centrality to American jazz and popular music provides the most visible support for this claim). What is required, simply, is an ear to the ground and a willingness to experiment.
If it is true, as it seems to be, that the aspect of the tuba (the sole aspect, really) which justifies its existence in the orchestral world is also its greatest handicap in virtually every other musical context, then it is also true that, as with the broader question of identity, the challenge in overcoming this handicap is presently more conceptual and cultural than it is technical. After all, the instruments, pedagogy and acoustical spaces tubists need to find artistic success outside of the orchestra pit all exist, and the repertoire, which has been slower to materialize, cannot be far off. What is spectacularly and painfully absent, however, is an instrumental culture which values these extra-orchestral possibilities to a degree commensurate with their artistic potential. If the need for such a thing is not already obvious, consider that Lippman, an eminent musicologist of his day writing here in an area of specialty, does not once refer to the tuba despite numerous readymade opportunities to do so. Such is the extent to which today’s tubists have come to need this aging repertoire even more than it needs them.
It is one thing to show the tuba to be capable of more than what it is asked to do in the orchestra; it is another thing entirely to show these capabilities to be useful. No matter how great the skill and artistry of future generations of tuba players, these generations will be stifled at every turn by any musical culture which places the same disproportionate emphasis on 18th and 19th century orchestral repertoire as is placed by the institutions through which most tuba players today receive their musical training. In order for other contributions to be valued, the musical styles and idioms in which they are to be made must be valued as well. The task of advocating for these new musical styles and idioms is both more vital and more arduous than that of advocating for one's instrument, and the latter will not be accomplished before the former.
The symphony orchestra repertoire is arguably the Western musical tradition's greatest contribution, but it has not, will not, and indeed cannot be the place where the tuba finds its voice as an equal instrumental partner in the contemporary musical landscape. That landscape will be shaped by a vast array of both traditional and experimental musical media, among them myriad settings to which the tuba has far more to offer than it does to the orchestra. Of course, any instrument has the most to offer to idioms which it helps to shape from the outset, and so the more tuba players who are active as creative voices rather than passive re-interpreters, the more prominent place the instrument will occupy in the future of music. Instrumental advocacy after the fact can never achieve as much.
Few would dispute that the tuba has repeatedly proven itself to offer enormous contributions to musical endeavors far different from those for which it was designed. The musicians, engineers and tinkerers whose collective efforts have yielded the modern tuba have truly created a monster, and nowhere in this essay is it insinuated that the tuba's characteristic tonal breadth makes it unsuitable for non-orchestral uses. There are, however, more and less productive ways to address this handicap, the most common of which serve only to make matters worse.
While all instrumentalists are at some point charged with exaggerating articulations and dynamics in order to overcome the limitations of their acoustical environment, the extent to which tubists are traditionally required or expected to do so is a cancer on their musical and artistic development. Band tuba playing in particular is less art than craft, and tubists are almost never allowed to trust their ears in this setting, certainly with dynamics, but also (and of more dire consequence) with regard to time. The handicap of the instrument cannot be denied, nor can the efficacy of such time-honored techniques in achieving their intended results be questioned, but given that the vast majority of tuba players receive their earliest and most extensive ensemble training in settings where such musical contortions are required of them as a matter of course (and indeed, where their necessity is a matter of wide pedagogical consensus), it is not a trivial matter that such training is useless in, if not downright counterproductive to, the development of high-level musical artistry.
Band playing is, of course, only the most egregious example; there are myriad combinations of orchestration and acoustics capable of creating severe enough discrepancies in perception between performer and listener for musical contrivances to become necessary. Experienced performers know that such situations can never be avoided 100 percent of the time, but also that performing under such circumstances is a fundamentally different experience from the ideal, and that to do so frequently is among the most frustrating and unfulfilling of lives for a musician to lead. As tubists, we must cease to accept such fate as a foregone conclusion and begin to find ways of living the truly musical life of a sound artist who works in real time; we must no longer allow ourselves to be trained to so thoroughly distrust our ears, forbidden to experience the full emotional impact of musical performance even while surrounded by a symphony of artists who would riot were such an injustice imposed on them; and we must instead find outlets in spaces, ensembles and musical styles which permit us full membership in the musicians’ club, where we can play in time as it sounds correct from our chairs rather than being conditioned to avoid doing so at all costs.
CODA: COMPLETE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO OPERATING IN THE AFFIRMATIVE
After reading everything that I have written above, some will surely see fit to remind me that the undue stereotyping of the tuba and those who play it is still a reality, that the audience most tubists (including myself) face is not merely naive but in fact harbors strong preconceptions about the instrument, and that these preconceptions are mostly negative (and also mostly false). They would raise all of this (none of which I would dispute) to ultimately argue that by abandoning instrumental advocacy for its own sake, we make a deal with the devil whereby a blind eye is turned to such injustices in exchange for the privilege to crawl under a rock and make music that no one really wants to hear but us. If such a thought is just that scary to anyone who has read this far, I offer as a substitute for the entire preceding essay a mere couple of sentences from the notes to Howard Johnson's album "Gravity!!!" which more or less make the same point:
Some people, hearing what Howard and his colleagues have created, say: "it doesn't sound like tubas." But, as Howard is quick to point out, "This is what tubas sound like. I can't account for what you've heard until now."3
Of course, Howard's band is comprised of individualists, and so one could argue that they do not, in fact, sound like any other tuba players. That is very different, however, from sounding like something they are not.
“This is what tubas sound like.” And this and this and this...
NOTES
1. Jacobs, Arnold. “The Musician Plays The Instrument.” Portrait of an Artist. CD. Summit Records, 2000.
2. Lippman, Edward A., “The Tonal Ideal of Romanticism” in The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music. University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 123-35.
3. Henthoff, Nat. “Beyond Category.” Liner notes. Gravity!!! CD. Verve Records, 1996.
14 May 2011
A Listening Heresy
A non-musician music-lover I know blurted out the other day that his experiences with live music have been uniformly awful and his experiences listening at home to recorded music much more consistently enjoyable. I suppose that as the resident "professional" musician in his social circle it was my duty at that point to go to the mat for live music, but I couldn't, and I can't. In fact, I might even in a moment of weakness utter something very similar to what he did given the opportunity.
My curmudgeonly hang-ups about acoustics and milieu will be all too familiar to regular readers, so I won't rehash them at length. To the contrary, the purpose this time around is to emphasize that the more general reason I could not in good faith take the opposing viewpoint in the discussion with my friend is because I myself am able to enjoy only a very small percentage of the music I hear in person, and that even in light of the less-than-ideal acoustical and social settings which frequently detract from said performances, this is more often than not simply because I do not enjoy the music itself, and would not enjoy it even when heard in more ideal environments. All of this is in spite of my attendance at only a small fraction of the already small number of concerts I expect, for one reason or another, to enjoy (few enough, in fact, to engender some measure of disdain on the part of a few colleagues). Were I too cave to professional obligation more often, I'd likely be even more unhappy.
There are a few different reasons why I'm tough to please, and some of them vary with the type of music or concert in question. The paradigm in classical programming tending toward a certain perfunctory breadth in style, medium and time period, it is essentially impossible for me to look forward to each piece on virtually any given program (I suspect I am hardly alone, though mine likely is the inverse of the prevailing taste among orchestra and chamber crowds). This is less of a concern in the jazz area, where sets tend to be a bit more stylistically specialized, if not in the choice of material, then certainly in the band's interpretation of it. Here, rather, it is the indispensable spontaneity of the music which is both an asset and a liability, as of course it must be; it is both a blessing and a curse that one knows less what to expect from a jazz performance than most classical ones.
Different as these considerations are, the results (i.e. my "success rate" in enjoying the music enough to feel that the expenditure of time and, usually, money was justified) are about the same, and this, I imagine you're thinking, should be a bit more troubling than I obviously find it. I'm certainly not all that troubled by it as an indication of something that might be wrong with me because it was not always this way. As a teen, when I'd barely scratched the surface of the live or recorded music available to me, I enjoyed most anything I went to; as my background grew richer, my experience more plentiful, and my perception more acute, negative reactions became more common. That they would eventually come to be the majority is, I suppose, cause for concern, whether more for me or for the scene I inhabit. Given the causes, though, it's difficult to see the situation reversing, or even standing pat. For a practitioner, refinement (especially of perception) is a necessity for artistic growth, and I continue to work at it in many areas of musical endeavor. No one should really be surprised at the consequences for one's listening habits. (If you are, you must be an arts administrator, and so I'll restate for possibly the five-thousandth time in this space that I think this dynamic greatly problematizes much music outreach which treats greater technical and perceptual sophistication as the Rosetta Stone of audience development.)
Nor would I necessarily say that I enjoy "as music" a greater percentage of the recorded music I listen to, but because I can readily repeat the experience with the good stuff, I am indeed happy more of the time. And of course, obtaining this music is cheaper and easier than traveling to a venue, the disc does not look at me sideways if I decline to order a drink (or order just one), and the experience can be aborted without offense taken or social awkwardness ensuing should its artistic futility be so immediately and conclusively apparent. Surprised to read this coming from a musician? I don't know why you would be. We're not that different from everyone else, including in that our public statements are often made purely out of fear of contradicting the company line. Most musicians would tell you that their very most powerful and lasting listening experiences were live ones, a sentiment which I would echo wholeheartedly. I think very few of us might continue on to express how exceedingly rare these experiences have been for us because we fear that doing so might expose our life's work (for most in my circles, it's live performing, not recording) as an exercise in futility. In the case of this conversation, I was not in a position to simply stop talking, but rather was confronted baldly with the assertion, and hence could not honestly disagree. To the extent I'm of a mind to change such opinions (including my own) at all, I'm far more inspired to invest in the consummation of my own live musical products (in which I am the primary variable) than I am to take time away from those endeavors to attend more of other people's gigs (the quality of which I have no control over whatsoever, and the quantity of which makes it impossible for me to make everyone happy).
My curmudgeonly hang-ups about acoustics and milieu will be all too familiar to regular readers, so I won't rehash them at length. To the contrary, the purpose this time around is to emphasize that the more general reason I could not in good faith take the opposing viewpoint in the discussion with my friend is because I myself am able to enjoy only a very small percentage of the music I hear in person, and that even in light of the less-than-ideal acoustical and social settings which frequently detract from said performances, this is more often than not simply because I do not enjoy the music itself, and would not enjoy it even when heard in more ideal environments. All of this is in spite of my attendance at only a small fraction of the already small number of concerts I expect, for one reason or another, to enjoy (few enough, in fact, to engender some measure of disdain on the part of a few colleagues). Were I too cave to professional obligation more often, I'd likely be even more unhappy.
There are a few different reasons why I'm tough to please, and some of them vary with the type of music or concert in question. The paradigm in classical programming tending toward a certain perfunctory breadth in style, medium and time period, it is essentially impossible for me to look forward to each piece on virtually any given program (I suspect I am hardly alone, though mine likely is the inverse of the prevailing taste among orchestra and chamber crowds). This is less of a concern in the jazz area, where sets tend to be a bit more stylistically specialized, if not in the choice of material, then certainly in the band's interpretation of it. Here, rather, it is the indispensable spontaneity of the music which is both an asset and a liability, as of course it must be; it is both a blessing and a curse that one knows less what to expect from a jazz performance than most classical ones.
Different as these considerations are, the results (i.e. my "success rate" in enjoying the music enough to feel that the expenditure of time and, usually, money was justified) are about the same, and this, I imagine you're thinking, should be a bit more troubling than I obviously find it. I'm certainly not all that troubled by it as an indication of something that might be wrong with me because it was not always this way. As a teen, when I'd barely scratched the surface of the live or recorded music available to me, I enjoyed most anything I went to; as my background grew richer, my experience more plentiful, and my perception more acute, negative reactions became more common. That they would eventually come to be the majority is, I suppose, cause for concern, whether more for me or for the scene I inhabit. Given the causes, though, it's difficult to see the situation reversing, or even standing pat. For a practitioner, refinement (especially of perception) is a necessity for artistic growth, and I continue to work at it in many areas of musical endeavor. No one should really be surprised at the consequences for one's listening habits. (If you are, you must be an arts administrator, and so I'll restate for possibly the five-thousandth time in this space that I think this dynamic greatly problematizes much music outreach which treats greater technical and perceptual sophistication as the Rosetta Stone of audience development.)
Nor would I necessarily say that I enjoy "as music" a greater percentage of the recorded music I listen to, but because I can readily repeat the experience with the good stuff, I am indeed happy more of the time. And of course, obtaining this music is cheaper and easier than traveling to a venue, the disc does not look at me sideways if I decline to order a drink (or order just one), and the experience can be aborted without offense taken or social awkwardness ensuing should its artistic futility be so immediately and conclusively apparent. Surprised to read this coming from a musician? I don't know why you would be. We're not that different from everyone else, including in that our public statements are often made purely out of fear of contradicting the company line. Most musicians would tell you that their very most powerful and lasting listening experiences were live ones, a sentiment which I would echo wholeheartedly. I think very few of us might continue on to express how exceedingly rare these experiences have been for us because we fear that doing so might expose our life's work (for most in my circles, it's live performing, not recording) as an exercise in futility. In the case of this conversation, I was not in a position to simply stop talking, but rather was confronted baldly with the assertion, and hence could not honestly disagree. To the extent I'm of a mind to change such opinions (including my own) at all, I'm far more inspired to invest in the consummation of my own live musical products (in which I am the primary variable) than I am to take time away from those endeavors to attend more of other people's gigs (the quality of which I have no control over whatsoever, and the quantity of which makes it impossible for me to make everyone happy).
01 May 2011
Understanding
I'm halfway through Peter Kivy's "Music Alone" and have therein unearthed one of my earliest philosophical fascinations (it's a pet peeve, actually), namely the far-too-great demands placed by much musicological discourse on the words "understand" and "comprehend." One of my very first efforts at writing words about music was on this subject; I was in over my head and more or less gave up, but my early intuition that the sense in which so many of us use these terms is not entirely valid (or, at the very least, not ideal) remains strong.
Schoenberg famously wrote that, "What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility," later revealing that by "comprehensibility" he more or less means "familiarity." Kivy takes a similar tack, equating the extent of musical understanding with the ability to describe the music (sounds silly when stated so baldly, but he defends it well), which is, of course, largely a matter of familiarity. To me, though, familiarity and understanding are not the same thing; there is much music with which I am intimately familiar (most of which I also heartily enjoy) that I nonetheless could not claim to truly understand in any sense of that word I'm aware of.
When pressed, a certain authority on such matters once told me that there is no philosophical consensus on what it means to understand a piece of music. Why, then, I asked, does there seem to be such broad philosophical consensus that "understand" is the right word? It has always seemed to me that we chose the word first because it sounded good, then went looking for support only after we were in too deep. The conclusion of my adolescent treatise was that musical pleasure and intellectual understanding (i.e. of anything in particular) are similar sensations arrived at by very different pathways, and that this has essentially fooled our musical culture into describing them as more or less equivalent rather than only vaguely similar. (Perhaps one even encompasses the other, but I would still argue against describing them so similarly.) I'd likely take a different path to this conclusion today, but would probably arrive there just the same. I can't help but view the concept of musical understanding as purely metaphorical and certainly less-than-ideal for the purposes of a rigorous philosophical discussion. Here's one youthful view I've not yet outgrown.
Schoenberg famously wrote that, "What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility," later revealing that by "comprehensibility" he more or less means "familiarity." Kivy takes a similar tack, equating the extent of musical understanding with the ability to describe the music (sounds silly when stated so baldly, but he defends it well), which is, of course, largely a matter of familiarity. To me, though, familiarity and understanding are not the same thing; there is much music with which I am intimately familiar (most of which I also heartily enjoy) that I nonetheless could not claim to truly understand in any sense of that word I'm aware of.
When pressed, a certain authority on such matters once told me that there is no philosophical consensus on what it means to understand a piece of music. Why, then, I asked, does there seem to be such broad philosophical consensus that "understand" is the right word? It has always seemed to me that we chose the word first because it sounded good, then went looking for support only after we were in too deep. The conclusion of my adolescent treatise was that musical pleasure and intellectual understanding (i.e. of anything in particular) are similar sensations arrived at by very different pathways, and that this has essentially fooled our musical culture into describing them as more or less equivalent rather than only vaguely similar. (Perhaps one even encompasses the other, but I would still argue against describing them so similarly.) I'd likely take a different path to this conclusion today, but would probably arrive there just the same. I can't help but view the concept of musical understanding as purely metaphorical and certainly less-than-ideal for the purposes of a rigorous philosophical discussion. Here's one youthful view I've not yet outgrown.
12 February 2011
How Rockers Categorize Stuff
After years of puzzled curiosity, I think I've finally figured it out:
If the music sells well, it's Rock.
This must be why so many classic Monk and Miles albums are labeled as "Rock" in digital music services' catalogs.
If the music requires at least half a brain to play, it's Jazz (or a hybrid of it).
This must be why a band like Behold...The Arctopus, in whose music one detects scarcely a hint of jazz, gets labeled as "Jazz-Metal" anyway.
In light of this realization, frequent MFEDI readers should be advised of an important change in editorial policy. Effective immediately, terms such as "Jazz-Rock Fusion" will no longer refer to the groove-driven, increasingly amplified stylistic mash-up pioneered by many prominent American and European instrumentalists of the late 1960's and early 1970's, but rather to a tiny group of works which meet the criteria for both styles as laid out above (that is, to "Kind of Blue" and Gorecki's Third Symphony). We apologize for any confusion.
If the music sells well, it's Rock.
This must be why so many classic Monk and Miles albums are labeled as "Rock" in digital music services' catalogs.
If the music requires at least half a brain to play, it's Jazz (or a hybrid of it).
This must be why a band like Behold...The Arctopus, in whose music one detects scarcely a hint of jazz, gets labeled as "Jazz-Metal" anyway.
In light of this realization, frequent MFEDI readers should be advised of an important change in editorial policy. Effective immediately, terms such as "Jazz-Rock Fusion" will no longer refer to the groove-driven, increasingly amplified stylistic mash-up pioneered by many prominent American and European instrumentalists of the late 1960's and early 1970's, but rather to a tiny group of works which meet the criteria for both styles as laid out above (that is, to "Kind of Blue" and Gorecki's Third Symphony). We apologize for any confusion.
23 January 2011
Second Loves (iii)
As a college student, I lost track of how many times I heard or overheard classmates assailing professors for being smart, as in:
"He's so full of himself."
"He just loves the sound of his own voice."
"He thinks he's the smartest person in the world."
...and occasionally, though it's only peripherally related, things like:
"He's tenured, he doesn't have to do shit."
I was raised, in part, by a tenured professor, and take a certain amount of offense to this kind of thing simply by virtue of that. But since I've never, for better or worse, actually taken a class from my dad, nor even taken one in his field, I don't feel that my perspective on this sort of thing is too extensively colored by my coming from an academic family. My professors were all unrelated to me and all taught other subjects, and for the most part, they were brilliant people. Even in the exceedingly rare cases where I developed an irreconcilable personal or philosophical difference with one of them, I always felt and continue to feel fortunate to have been exposed to their perspectives and knowledge.
In my experience, it's not a myth that students now tend to be more concerned with winning the game of college than they are with actual learning. I watched classmates grovel and haggle more like they were buying a used car than discussing a test question, and they almost always won. They were casual and distant when it came to studying, but utterly relentless when they detected the smallest vulnerability in the instructor, and if they thought they could get a test question thrown out, an extra day to study, or a class canceled, they fought to the bitter end. It was the path of least resistance towards a respectable grade, and the fact that it didn't pass through much of anywhere that would make them better musicians, scholars or people was no deterrent. The profs who held their ground on these matters who were the first to be accused of thinking that they're better than the rest of us, but I can honestly say that I never once found myself thinking that about a professor of mine. Even the tiny minority of them who somehow managed to thoroughly lose my respect never did it by actively making me feel inferior.
All of this is a mere prelude to what I really want to discuss here, which is the one instance in which a professor's expansive knowledge truly alienated me (by an entirely different mechanism), yet in doing so laid the groundwork for a constructive shift in priorities that is just now coming to fruition. The fact that this musicologist seemed to know an incredible amount made me very uneasy, but for an entirely different reason than my classmates: he'd done nothing notable as a performer or composer, nor was he, to my knowledge, actively involved in either craft at that time, though I believe he had been as a young man. To me as an undergraduate performance major, the purpose of gathering knowledge was to turn around and produce something out of it; one could never know too much, yet one most certainly could fail to produce music of a value commensurate with their booksmarts, the gatherer's later inability to synthesize these ideas into something tangible thus rendering the gathering itself a terrible waste of time. The realm of so-called "tangible" products included performances, scores and recordings; teaching, which even at that age I never thought myself above, I didn't see as belonging in this category. You certainly could argue that it does, but that point was moot to me at that time; I was so infatuated with playing and writing that I couldn't understand why anyone who was even mildly capable of them would voluntarily give them up, especially someone with such a vast intellect as to be capable of making contributions to the practice that simply can't be made any other way.
Having long since grown frustrated with my classmates' collective groveling, it troubled me that my own worldview had suddenly provided a seemingly rational justification for holding a professor of mine in contempt just for being really smart. I wasn't a tuba jock and didn't want to be one, but playing was still the center of my universe, and coming into close contact with someone whose sheer quantity of knowledge seemed wholly unattainable as a mere side project to my playing endeavors forced me to think long-term about my musical priorities in a way that I hadn't before. How would I ever manage to study all the scores, recordings, philosophy, musicology, theory, history, math, computers, biology, physics and visual art that might constructively inform my work without also divesting myself of the very practice and writing time needed to actually realize it? More recently, the crisis has become: What if I committed the opposite crime as him, investing too much time in producing stuff and not enough in study and preparation, thus yielding a large body of mediocre, naive, unsophisticated work?
Again, let me be clear that when I say this professor alienated me, it wasn't simply because he forced me to question myself, uncomfortable as it was. I knew in my heart of hearts even then that all of this was worth wrestling with and not worth putting off. Rather, the alienation I speak of was my judging him negatively for not putting his knowledge to what I considered to be good, i.e. productive use (a problematic and distinctively youthful perspective to be sure, but not one I would wholly disavow either). I've taken the time to relate all of this here because it has been only within the last year or so that the minor personal crisis which began years ago in this professor's class has begun to resolve itself (albeit by shattering into several mini-crises at once).
This has been a twofold process: it started with the first conclusive realization that I was indeed headed down the very abyss I feared I might be, namely that of lofty musical aspirations built on shoddy intellectual foundations; and it continues as an odd and sudden, almost unrelated desire for knowledge for its own sake which I'm at something of a loss to explain (this being a blog, though, I do attempt a partial explanation below). It certainly is a relief to resolve years of tension between the part of me that saw this prof as a navel gazer and that which saw him as a genius; ironically, though, it's because the intervening years have made me much more insecure, not less. I've found myself particularly anxious over social situations where my lack of knowledge of something musical might be exposed. It's another interesting consequence of the twentysomething years that as you progress through them, people get noticeably less and less kind about hipping you to music and musicians they think you should know about, even people who are close to you in age and/or spirit. There's a downright meanness to it these days that teachers seldom use with students, nor parents with children. So while I now probably know three times what I did as a college student, suddenly it seems never to be good enough to satisfy all the specialists that I, the voyeuristic generalist, insist on working with, and so in addition to constructively spurring on the great knowledge gathering expedition that has been my late twenties (the same one I should have begun in my teens but, like most of us, simply wasn't grown-up or fully-formed enough to initiate), I now have to admit that it has slowly been making me mean and insecure too, and that this meanness and insecurity is feeding my sudden motivation to study as strongly as any of the more practical or altruistic reasons are. Apparently, the well-worn saying ought to be amended to read, "The more people you know, the more stuff you don't know." It's the worst reason I can think of to hit the books, but I'm generally content to take what I can get in the self-motivation department.
"He's so full of himself."
"He just loves the sound of his own voice."
"He thinks he's the smartest person in the world."
...and occasionally, though it's only peripherally related, things like:
"He's tenured, he doesn't have to do shit."
I was raised, in part, by a tenured professor, and take a certain amount of offense to this kind of thing simply by virtue of that. But since I've never, for better or worse, actually taken a class from my dad, nor even taken one in his field, I don't feel that my perspective on this sort of thing is too extensively colored by my coming from an academic family. My professors were all unrelated to me and all taught other subjects, and for the most part, they were brilliant people. Even in the exceedingly rare cases where I developed an irreconcilable personal or philosophical difference with one of them, I always felt and continue to feel fortunate to have been exposed to their perspectives and knowledge.
In my experience, it's not a myth that students now tend to be more concerned with winning the game of college than they are with actual learning. I watched classmates grovel and haggle more like they were buying a used car than discussing a test question, and they almost always won. They were casual and distant when it came to studying, but utterly relentless when they detected the smallest vulnerability in the instructor, and if they thought they could get a test question thrown out, an extra day to study, or a class canceled, they fought to the bitter end. It was the path of least resistance towards a respectable grade, and the fact that it didn't pass through much of anywhere that would make them better musicians, scholars or people was no deterrent. The profs who held their ground on these matters who were the first to be accused of thinking that they're better than the rest of us, but I can honestly say that I never once found myself thinking that about a professor of mine. Even the tiny minority of them who somehow managed to thoroughly lose my respect never did it by actively making me feel inferior.
All of this is a mere prelude to what I really want to discuss here, which is the one instance in which a professor's expansive knowledge truly alienated me (by an entirely different mechanism), yet in doing so laid the groundwork for a constructive shift in priorities that is just now coming to fruition. The fact that this musicologist seemed to know an incredible amount made me very uneasy, but for an entirely different reason than my classmates: he'd done nothing notable as a performer or composer, nor was he, to my knowledge, actively involved in either craft at that time, though I believe he had been as a young man. To me as an undergraduate performance major, the purpose of gathering knowledge was to turn around and produce something out of it; one could never know too much, yet one most certainly could fail to produce music of a value commensurate with their booksmarts, the gatherer's later inability to synthesize these ideas into something tangible thus rendering the gathering itself a terrible waste of time. The realm of so-called "tangible" products included performances, scores and recordings; teaching, which even at that age I never thought myself above, I didn't see as belonging in this category. You certainly could argue that it does, but that point was moot to me at that time; I was so infatuated with playing and writing that I couldn't understand why anyone who was even mildly capable of them would voluntarily give them up, especially someone with such a vast intellect as to be capable of making contributions to the practice that simply can't be made any other way.
Having long since grown frustrated with my classmates' collective groveling, it troubled me that my own worldview had suddenly provided a seemingly rational justification for holding a professor of mine in contempt just for being really smart. I wasn't a tuba jock and didn't want to be one, but playing was still the center of my universe, and coming into close contact with someone whose sheer quantity of knowledge seemed wholly unattainable as a mere side project to my playing endeavors forced me to think long-term about my musical priorities in a way that I hadn't before. How would I ever manage to study all the scores, recordings, philosophy, musicology, theory, history, math, computers, biology, physics and visual art that might constructively inform my work without also divesting myself of the very practice and writing time needed to actually realize it? More recently, the crisis has become: What if I committed the opposite crime as him, investing too much time in producing stuff and not enough in study and preparation, thus yielding a large body of mediocre, naive, unsophisticated work?
Again, let me be clear that when I say this professor alienated me, it wasn't simply because he forced me to question myself, uncomfortable as it was. I knew in my heart of hearts even then that all of this was worth wrestling with and not worth putting off. Rather, the alienation I speak of was my judging him negatively for not putting his knowledge to what I considered to be good, i.e. productive use (a problematic and distinctively youthful perspective to be sure, but not one I would wholly disavow either). I've taken the time to relate all of this here because it has been only within the last year or so that the minor personal crisis which began years ago in this professor's class has begun to resolve itself (albeit by shattering into several mini-crises at once).
This has been a twofold process: it started with the first conclusive realization that I was indeed headed down the very abyss I feared I might be, namely that of lofty musical aspirations built on shoddy intellectual foundations; and it continues as an odd and sudden, almost unrelated desire for knowledge for its own sake which I'm at something of a loss to explain (this being a blog, though, I do attempt a partial explanation below). It certainly is a relief to resolve years of tension between the part of me that saw this prof as a navel gazer and that which saw him as a genius; ironically, though, it's because the intervening years have made me much more insecure, not less. I've found myself particularly anxious over social situations where my lack of knowledge of something musical might be exposed. It's another interesting consequence of the twentysomething years that as you progress through them, people get noticeably less and less kind about hipping you to music and musicians they think you should know about, even people who are close to you in age and/or spirit. There's a downright meanness to it these days that teachers seldom use with students, nor parents with children. So while I now probably know three times what I did as a college student, suddenly it seems never to be good enough to satisfy all the specialists that I, the voyeuristic generalist, insist on working with, and so in addition to constructively spurring on the great knowledge gathering expedition that has been my late twenties (the same one I should have begun in my teens but, like most of us, simply wasn't grown-up or fully-formed enough to initiate), I now have to admit that it has slowly been making me mean and insecure too, and that this meanness and insecurity is feeding my sudden motivation to study as strongly as any of the more practical or altruistic reasons are. Apparently, the well-worn saying ought to be amended to read, "The more people you know, the more stuff you don't know." It's the worst reason I can think of to hit the books, but I'm generally content to take what I can get in the self-motivation department.
04 January 2011
Second Loves (ii)
Hip-hop is the area of popular music (lower case, broadly construed) that has always piqued my interest disproportionately from all the others. Nailing down what exactly it is that I like about hip-hop and putting those impressions into words carries with it the same myriad pitfalls that accompany that task elsewhere in music, not the least of which is that the term "hip-hop" is general enough to include quite a bit of music I couldn't care less about. The best I can do, I think, is to say that I really like the "time feel" of certain rappers, and that when it serves the words particularly well, I like it even more. Most hip-hop songs, like most vocal jazz, classical art songs, and operas, fall well short of this exalted status, but very occasionally, I hear one that "works" on both levels, and it's threatening to become more than a passing fancy.
Yet I'm at a time in my life and career when even a dabbling side project in hip-hop doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Some colleagues would never speak to me again, others would just chuckle under their breath, and only if I'm lucky would a handful of sympathetic ones actually get my angle on it. But before the social consequences can even be considered, there's the more pressing issue of what to do about the music I've already devoted myself to, which is already an overcommitment and certainly doesn't need a mid-stream transition to a largely foreign style competing with it for time and attention. One solution is to skip the dirty work and simply launch into this new territory with little historical, technical or social perspective on it; everyone knows that's a recipe for disaster, though.
As I ruminate on whether or not to act on any of these impulses, here they are organized quite roughly into four musico-technical areas and given as something of a manifesto, a glimpse of what I might attempt in this realm if the stars were ever to align:
Part 1: Structure
Common-practice hip-hop leaves the most to be desired in the area of structure, and hence, this would seem to me to be where the most fertile ground for experimentation and innovation lies (and indeed, where the need for it is beyond pressing; it's looong overdue). In every hip-hop song I want to like but can't, there's a two bar drum loop to remind me that I'm listening to a commercially packaged product, music that needs to be "memorable" in order to be validated, and where through composition is a vice which merely "distracts" listeners from the all-important text. I see no reason why through-composed hip-hop is any less tenable than through-composed jazz of the kind that Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and others have made their names with, or for that matter, why the surface elements of a Kurt Elling vocalese couldn't serve as a model for what forward-thinking rappers might fill these new and exciting structures up with.
In other words, someone needs to do for hip-hop what Behold...The Arctopus has done for metal: combine the timbres and time-feels of a pop music style with classical-modernist approaches to tonality, structure and motivic development. Of course, the mainstream pop lemmings have branded Behold... as "the worst band in the world," and one can imagine the mainstream hip-hop crowd reacting similarly to what I'm imagining. This music would be doomed to the kind of narrow appeal that keeps Kyle Gann up at night, but I would stand by my argument that pursuing such directions is both more necessary and more ethically defensible than musical sycophancy.
I shouldn't speak in hypotheticals. I think it's highly unlikely that no one has tried this yet; it's more likely that I just don't know where to find them. (Anyone out there know?) Genre searches on sites like MySpace, CDBaby and eMusic are either not specific enough, or downright misleading. I googled "progressive hip hop" and learned that using *4-bar* drum loops, a few "live" instruments, and making passing references to politics is all it takes to be worthy of that label. No thanks.
Part 2: Materials
As with structure, it's essential that the progressive hip-hop I'm envisioning cast a far wider melodic, harmonic and rhythmic net than today's commercial hip-hop does. A mentor of mine in the jazz area has always been fond of saying that a rhythm section's comping should be interesting enough to listen to on its own without necessarily intruding on what the soloist is trying to do. I can't think of a better admonition in this discussion either, and I think anyone who remembers cassettes with the complete rap song on one side and just the beat on the other will agree that those B sides were a lot less fun to just sit around and listen to than they were to horse around with. Yes, I realize that this is part and parcel of what hip-hop is; I am more concerned, though, with what it might be able to become, which is a hell of a lot more than bashing people over the head with the same sample literally hundreds of times in the span of only a few minutes.
Part 3: Content
I'm sick and tired of reading about how modern classical music, jazz, improvised music, and whatever else the musical populists out there might decide to tar with the modernist brush if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, are irrelevant because they're too "self-referrential." CHEE-RIST, have any of you sycophants listened to hip-hop lately? If you do, you'll hear a music that literally refers to itself constantly, sung by people who simply cannot stop talking about themselves (and they don't have much to say, either). This is first order self-indulgent "fanservice" if I ever heard it, except the get-out-of-jail-free card otherwise known as the *backbeat* is redeemable for a free pass with any Cultural Studies major that might happen to hear it. So much for the words being more important than the music.
To their credit, at least hip-hop artists can be counted on to venture beyond "Ooh yeah, baby, I love you" with greater regularity than most any other vocal music tradition, popular or classical. Poetry as an art form typically does less than nothing for me, but even so, I'd have to rank the lyrical sophistication of hip-hop pretty high on the list of human cultural accomplishments. There are vast untapped possibilities, though, particularly in the realms of abstraction, nonsense, Dadaism, and scatting. Again, it's a matter of isolating particular elements of timbre and time-feel and importing them to other tonal and structural contexts. And on the rare occasion anyone comes up with a story worth telling to music, that's cool too. It had better be good, though, and if you're the main character, you better have accomplished something besides screwing or shooting somebody, because we've already heard that one a few hundred thousand times.
Part 4: Improvisation
One day about 5 years ago, pretty soon after I had graduated from college, I decided to indulge my curiosity by trying to teach myself to freestyle rap. The idea was as ridiculous then as it is now, but I felt like I had to try, if for no other reason than to gain an appreciation for people who can really do it. Along with hitting a golf ball straight and sight-reading Nick Zielinski's tunes, it's one of the hardest things I've attempted in my life, and predictably, I lost interest within a few weeks. There were a couple of moments of beginners luck, though, where, in the privacy of my car or my bedroom, I rattled off some pretty sick shit, and while I had no illusions that I'd be able to do it consistently without years of practice, there was something addictive about it, something I've never gotten over despite the fact that the sheer oppressive difficulty of it the other 99% of the time was more than enough to scare me away from making any kind of commitment to it. It was obvious that this commitment would preclude the commitments I'd already made to other musical endeavors, and while I've always been a bit restless, blowing everything up and starting over didn't seem all that prescient, especially for something which neither my inherited nor my acquired traits seem to suit me particularly well for.
Even so, I feel like my theory that one could reasonably expect to be able to approach freestyling much the same way instrumental jazz players approach their art is one worth hanging on to. The idea still intrigues me even though I didn't pursue it nearly far enough to be able to validate or refute it conclusively. I did get as far as identifying words whose final syllables were particularly tricky to rhyme and making lists of possible solutions. The harder work of transcribing other songs and perfecting the timing and delivery I didn't have the patience for, and would have been too embarrassed to be heard attempting had anyone walked in. So, I won't be the one to break down the barriers in this area myself, but if I ever meet someone else who can, I'll be champing at the bit to be their musical director.
People who would know better than I do have told me that most rappers can't actually freestyle, and that 99.9% of everything we hear from them is preconceived. That doesn't surprise me if it's true, but I do find it very disappointing. I'd posit that just as listening to Supersax performing a transcribed Charlie Parker solo or a dixieland band playing from a published arrangement are poor substitutes for the real thing, preconceived rapping, while some of it is good, merely scratches the surface of what is musically possible for the genre. The half-assedness of my experiment notwithstanding, I'm willing to bet that by applying some tried-and-true principles from the teaching of other improvisational arts, one could bring about greater overall fluency in freestyle rap, though undoubtedly it would come with the same drawbacks that have surfaced in formalized jazz education (and indeed, they're already giving degrees in Hip-Hop Studies, so we're likely to start experiencing these drawbacks sometime soon if we haven't already).
Yet I'm at a time in my life and career when even a dabbling side project in hip-hop doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Some colleagues would never speak to me again, others would just chuckle under their breath, and only if I'm lucky would a handful of sympathetic ones actually get my angle on it. But before the social consequences can even be considered, there's the more pressing issue of what to do about the music I've already devoted myself to, which is already an overcommitment and certainly doesn't need a mid-stream transition to a largely foreign style competing with it for time and attention. One solution is to skip the dirty work and simply launch into this new territory with little historical, technical or social perspective on it; everyone knows that's a recipe for disaster, though.
As I ruminate on whether or not to act on any of these impulses, here they are organized quite roughly into four musico-technical areas and given as something of a manifesto, a glimpse of what I might attempt in this realm if the stars were ever to align:
Part 1: Structure
Common-practice hip-hop leaves the most to be desired in the area of structure, and hence, this would seem to me to be where the most fertile ground for experimentation and innovation lies (and indeed, where the need for it is beyond pressing; it's looong overdue). In every hip-hop song I want to like but can't, there's a two bar drum loop to remind me that I'm listening to a commercially packaged product, music that needs to be "memorable" in order to be validated, and where through composition is a vice which merely "distracts" listeners from the all-important text. I see no reason why through-composed hip-hop is any less tenable than through-composed jazz of the kind that Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and others have made their names with, or for that matter, why the surface elements of a Kurt Elling vocalese couldn't serve as a model for what forward-thinking rappers might fill these new and exciting structures up with.
In other words, someone needs to do for hip-hop what Behold...The Arctopus has done for metal: combine the timbres and time-feels of a pop music style with classical-modernist approaches to tonality, structure and motivic development. Of course, the mainstream pop lemmings have branded Behold... as "the worst band in the world," and one can imagine the mainstream hip-hop crowd reacting similarly to what I'm imagining. This music would be doomed to the kind of narrow appeal that keeps Kyle Gann up at night, but I would stand by my argument that pursuing such directions is both more necessary and more ethically defensible than musical sycophancy.
I shouldn't speak in hypotheticals. I think it's highly unlikely that no one has tried this yet; it's more likely that I just don't know where to find them. (Anyone out there know?) Genre searches on sites like MySpace, CDBaby and eMusic are either not specific enough, or downright misleading. I googled "progressive hip hop" and learned that using *4-bar* drum loops, a few "live" instruments, and making passing references to politics is all it takes to be worthy of that label. No thanks.
Part 2: Materials
As with structure, it's essential that the progressive hip-hop I'm envisioning cast a far wider melodic, harmonic and rhythmic net than today's commercial hip-hop does. A mentor of mine in the jazz area has always been fond of saying that a rhythm section's comping should be interesting enough to listen to on its own without necessarily intruding on what the soloist is trying to do. I can't think of a better admonition in this discussion either, and I think anyone who remembers cassettes with the complete rap song on one side and just the beat on the other will agree that those B sides were a lot less fun to just sit around and listen to than they were to horse around with. Yes, I realize that this is part and parcel of what hip-hop is; I am more concerned, though, with what it might be able to become, which is a hell of a lot more than bashing people over the head with the same sample literally hundreds of times in the span of only a few minutes.
Part 3: Content
I'm sick and tired of reading about how modern classical music, jazz, improvised music, and whatever else the musical populists out there might decide to tar with the modernist brush if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, are irrelevant because they're too "self-referrential." CHEE-RIST, have any of you sycophants listened to hip-hop lately? If you do, you'll hear a music that literally refers to itself constantly, sung by people who simply cannot stop talking about themselves (and they don't have much to say, either). This is first order self-indulgent "fanservice" if I ever heard it, except the get-out-of-jail-free card otherwise known as the *backbeat* is redeemable for a free pass with any Cultural Studies major that might happen to hear it. So much for the words being more important than the music.
To their credit, at least hip-hop artists can be counted on to venture beyond "Ooh yeah, baby, I love you" with greater regularity than most any other vocal music tradition, popular or classical. Poetry as an art form typically does less than nothing for me, but even so, I'd have to rank the lyrical sophistication of hip-hop pretty high on the list of human cultural accomplishments. There are vast untapped possibilities, though, particularly in the realms of abstraction, nonsense, Dadaism, and scatting. Again, it's a matter of isolating particular elements of timbre and time-feel and importing them to other tonal and structural contexts. And on the rare occasion anyone comes up with a story worth telling to music, that's cool too. It had better be good, though, and if you're the main character, you better have accomplished something besides screwing or shooting somebody, because we've already heard that one a few hundred thousand times.
Part 4: Improvisation
One day about 5 years ago, pretty soon after I had graduated from college, I decided to indulge my curiosity by trying to teach myself to freestyle rap. The idea was as ridiculous then as it is now, but I felt like I had to try, if for no other reason than to gain an appreciation for people who can really do it. Along with hitting a golf ball straight and sight-reading Nick Zielinski's tunes, it's one of the hardest things I've attempted in my life, and predictably, I lost interest within a few weeks. There were a couple of moments of beginners luck, though, where, in the privacy of my car or my bedroom, I rattled off some pretty sick shit, and while I had no illusions that I'd be able to do it consistently without years of practice, there was something addictive about it, something I've never gotten over despite the fact that the sheer oppressive difficulty of it the other 99% of the time was more than enough to scare me away from making any kind of commitment to it. It was obvious that this commitment would preclude the commitments I'd already made to other musical endeavors, and while I've always been a bit restless, blowing everything up and starting over didn't seem all that prescient, especially for something which neither my inherited nor my acquired traits seem to suit me particularly well for.
Even so, I feel like my theory that one could reasonably expect to be able to approach freestyling much the same way instrumental jazz players approach their art is one worth hanging on to. The idea still intrigues me even though I didn't pursue it nearly far enough to be able to validate or refute it conclusively. I did get as far as identifying words whose final syllables were particularly tricky to rhyme and making lists of possible solutions. The harder work of transcribing other songs and perfecting the timing and delivery I didn't have the patience for, and would have been too embarrassed to be heard attempting had anyone walked in. So, I won't be the one to break down the barriers in this area myself, but if I ever meet someone else who can, I'll be champing at the bit to be their musical director.
People who would know better than I do have told me that most rappers can't actually freestyle, and that 99.9% of everything we hear from them is preconceived. That doesn't surprise me if it's true, but I do find it very disappointing. I'd posit that just as listening to Supersax performing a transcribed Charlie Parker solo or a dixieland band playing from a published arrangement are poor substitutes for the real thing, preconceived rapping, while some of it is good, merely scratches the surface of what is musically possible for the genre. The half-assedness of my experiment notwithstanding, I'm willing to bet that by applying some tried-and-true principles from the teaching of other improvisational arts, one could bring about greater overall fluency in freestyle rap, though undoubtedly it would come with the same drawbacks that have surfaced in formalized jazz education (and indeed, they're already giving degrees in Hip-Hop Studies, so we're likely to start experiencing these drawbacks sometime soon if we haven't already).
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