Toward a New Isolation (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Concessions on Cliche

All cliches are idiomatic but not all idiomatic statements are cliches.

Idiomatic statements become cliches through overuse, and therefore only if they are exceptionally attractive or otherwise useful.

Cliche is relative: neophytes by definition cannot detect it. Contemporary art music has many more neophytes than initiates.

Toward a New Isolation (i)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same Difference (iii) – some comic relief re: the fashion issue

I haven't ventured to L.A. all that much since I've been at CalArts, but when I have, the heightened importance of grooming has frequently been in evidence. The first time I saw a musician sporting the more or less archetypal musico-hipster outfit from the neck down in combination with the perfectly trimmed goatee and freshly styled hair of an accountant, I knew I wasn't in Kansas (or Minnesota) anymore.

Same Difference (ii)

From an early stage in my musical development, I refused to embrace the expression of anything in particular as a worthy goal for music (mine or others'), and I haven't given much ground in the intervening years. It was at first merely a fact that I had not consciously or intentionally endowed any of my music with extra-musical content; only later did I become convinced through experience (can we just call it common sense?) that reverse-engineering the emotional impact of a particular piece on a particular person for the purpose of reconstituting it at will was, regardless of my own degree of interest in doing so, an absolutely impossible task. Such it is that "expression" in the colloquial sense in which that term is used by musicians and music-lovers remains more or less beyond the pale in my own work. Taken in the very most imprecise, deconstructed, overbroad sense, however, I'm not sure I can deny it completely.

My own social alienation has never been as simple as just being a painfully shy kid. I am a "blender," a "fly on the wall" almost wherever I go; I hear lots of things not meant for my ears; I startle roommates working in the kitchen who didn't see or hear me approach; I can sit at a bar for 20 minutes and not get served. When I stop to consider whether all of this might be, as most anyone I might relate this to is bound to respond, "all in my head," that it is more or less universal to the human experience and that what makes me different is not so much that it happens to me as how it affects me, I simply can't convince myself. Pushing 30, I'm both more convinced than ever that it's real and more disappointed than ever that I haven't managed to parlay this unteachable skill into a more lucrative and exciting career as an international jewel thief or double agent. It's getting harder and harder, though, to imagine that the career choices I have made cannot be partially explained in this way either.

To play tuba under these conditions is to both transcend and compound the problem. Depending on the acoustic and social environments at hand, the instrument may command undivided attention or it may be exceptionally easily ignored. It may be painfully loud or completely inaudible. In attempting complete musical statements where incomplete ones are no less than idiomatic and conventionalized, you will either wildly exceed the audience's expectations in your success, or, paradoxically, reinforce them even more strongly in failure at this loftier task than you ever could have by simply attempting that which they will continue to expect. I find that this mirrors my social experience quite closely, and if that does not really explain why I first became a tuba player, I think it might explain, at least in part, why I am still a tuba player today. You have to learn to live with your successes and failures alike being met with indifference; with being too loud for one kind of music you love and too quiet for another, and with being happy enough if someone so much as notices that one or the other is the case. These are not good feelings, but I knew them quite well from the hallways, the school bus and the baseball field long before I knew that music was my calling. So here I am, relatively unharmed, but not entirely at peace either.

The tuba is big and shiny and low and loud, superficial qualities which might get you noticed for a second, but won't hold anyone's attention much beyond that. Indeed, there's music (art, we hope) to be made on the tuba, and also on hundreds of other instruments. Art will not get you noticed by very many people, of course, but the few who do engage with your work will remember it for a long time. And as any good student of Music Business will tell you, the extent to which you are "different" is more or less directly proportional to the duration and intensity of this memory. This much, I think, was clear to me from the outset, if not on the most elementary, intuitive level, and I would not aspire to mislead anyone based on the first entry in this series that this was not the case. It may even be fair to say that my work on some abstract level represents an "expression of difference," in other words, something people actually notice even as I myself remain (socially) easy to ignore. What I simply can't abide are the more concrete, overbearing, self-absorbed forays into this realm, the ones which simply shove this supposed "difference" that all of us artists suffer with right in the audience's proverbial face, necessarily dragging along those trivial personal details which are its necessary vessels of delivery. Are we not already different enough simply for making art, regardless of its content? And really, don't we like it that way?

Same Difference (i)

There are several different ways to explain "The Hipster Thing" as some here at CalArts have called it. One is as a contrived expression of supreme coolness: "I'm soooo cool that I still look cool in the most uncool clothes and grooming conceivable." Another is as an honest aesthetic predilection for said clothes and grooming instantiated in a particularly overbearing way. A third would be as having become the default universal identifier of "artists" to each other, a secret handshake of sorts, except that it's, you know, not a secret or a handshake. A fourth would be the naive, accidental (and, as I might self-interestedly argue, authentic) way of actually being just this uncool and actually owning a wardrobe just this tattered, yet being so comfortable-verging-on-narcissistic in your own skin (as well as oblivious to and/or generally contemptuous of the judgment of others) that you just don't give a fuck, and hence are so uncool that you can pass for cool based on novelty alone.

Does the contemporary popularity of these various modes of appearance not make it all too clear that their pioneers, who initially more truly viewed them as anti-fashions, and at that most of all for their supposed inability to be Capitalistically co-opted or gain bourgeois acceptance, and could more reasonably in their historical moment than in ours expect them to succeed as such, in fact failed miserably at all of this? To be sure, most all of the intentional fashions one sees at CalArts are retro in some respect; this is, yes, a thoroughly postmodern situation by which there seems to be little or no discernible present-day instance of Fashion beyond this mere potpourri of previous styles, each clearly identifiable by decade (and probably ultimately by year if you've payed more attention to pop culture than I have).

The common denominator, of course, between the pathways to Hipsterism given above is difference. Artists are different. We are both alienated and entitled. Our childhoods and adolescence, despite reflecting the bourgeois privilege of our upper-middle class families, were traumatic. In Kindergarten, making art was fun and everyone did it; by fourth grade, it was perfunctory; by seventh grade, peculiar; and by high school, it was downright dangerous. By college, even the master teachers and intellectuals we had escaped to, who supposedly had our best interests in mind and were being remunerated accordingly, had begun imposing stylistic restrictions, railing against the philosophies we had built our lives around, and prodding us to expunge the last traces of the adolescent naivete which had been our artistic inner flame if it threatened to prevent us from earning a living through our work. Art was no longer either a proper vocation or even a timely diversion. Difference, once a mere value-neutral distinction between two things, had in fact become a question of normalcy and pathology, and the moment we had realized we couldn't do anything else was the precise moment we realized this change had occurred.

Or was it (gasp...) the other way around?

It might come as a surprise to some that as an artist myself, I curse my own difference every day. If I am in any respect rebellious, complicated, difficult, unapproachable, this is because my sense of ethics tells me that the alternative is bad news, not because I do not have the same hopes, dreams and desires as a normal, healthy human being. Fitting in is only unattractive to me because of what it would mean under the present political, economic, social and cultural circumstances; all else being equal, I cannot sit here and say I wouldn't take it if I thought I could have it.

This is, needless to say, not the prevailing attitude I detect here at CalArts. More specifically, it is the opposite attitude. I think that the "present conditions," so to speak (all of them, everywhere, now), besides being difficult and unfortunate, also create a desperate need to distinguish oneself in any way possible. In that sense, it is no longer different to be different; rather, it is what everyone seems to want...and yet more acutely now that everyone seems to want it. I fear, above all, that art is little else to these children besides just another way to achieve this; that it is, really, no more genuine than the ridiculous outfits they wear, and serves no greater purpose in their lives.

And how could it be? What else here is authentic enough to so much as permit other authenticities to exist anywhere around it? What better exemplification of the folly of the academic art world than to bring together all of the "different" kids, find that they are all the same, and then watch them writhe aimlessly trying to recover their difference, or failing that, to create it from thin air? It is an unfortunate symptom of the overall condition of our culture that art has become more or less an inherently alienating act. Be this dynamic as it may somewhat inescapable, we nonetheless acquiesce to it at our own peril.

Blog Month IV: Perfunctory Terminal Posting

Meh.

The content-rich life is not for me. I do make it look good, though.

Survey: Should This Blog Be Hosted Elsewhere?

I want the honest of opinion of anyone who happens to read this.

I have a sentimental attachment to Blogger, and I utterly loathe the thoughts of changing the URL of my blog, redirecting readers through to the new one with a postdated entry, and losing whatever perception of accomplishment comes with displaying a five-year archive of overwrought vitriol in the right sidebar, BUT...this shit is starting to drive me bonkers. Simplicity is golden, inflexibility is lethal. While I have no use for fancy embedded media players or dancing Flash-animated tubas in the background, I'm sick to death of length limitations on comments, labels, titles and even, I just discovered, the total length of posts that are displayed on the home page, which evidently I've managed to exceed for the first time this Blog Month. Starting tomorrow, this monstrosity SHOULD display the complete month of December in chronological order (i.e. backwards from blogging standard practice). Not allowed. According to what I dug up, someone hacked the chronology stuff years ago, but a recent update to Blogger caused this to stop working. And fuck jump breaks. Jump breaks are for 13 year olds who only want to read the first paragraph to see if it's something they can plagiarize for their book report.

I've never used Wordpress. It looks too fancy and I'm afraid I'll like it too much. I don't know what its limitations may or may not be, how much you get for free, or how intuitive the interface is. I suppose it would be easy enough to find out. It's not comforting to know that the people who work for Google are plenty smart enough to design something state-of-the-art but choose not to. So tell me, if you have an opinion, whether you think I should stay here or go there. I'm listening.

Flavor of the (Final) Month

Year-end retrospectives are everywhere, and jazz critics in particular seem to love them some list making this time of year. It always gets me thinking: how many times have they actually spun each of these records? Did they audit them on $1000 speakers or in the car on the freeway? And how many other new releases have they spun this year? How many times? Where?

Musicians are prone to wondering these things when it comes to questions of critical authority, but I wonder also out of a bit of insecurity. I haven't acquired or listened to a single record that was released this calendar year. It's quite rare for me to do so any given year, and has been forever. Real or imagined professional obligation as a player, composer, teacher and thinker has compelled me to spend an awful lot of time catching up on things that happened before I was born, and only secondarily on staying "up to date" with the latest developments. Whether I'm winning the battle or not, this is slowly changing: I've acquired many more records released in the 2000's over the last couple of years than I did during the years they were actually released. There's plenty going on today that interests me; it's just so hard to find that it's easier to wait a while and see what people are still talking about at the end of next year. I've learned the hard way that it's safe, nay, essential to ignore flavors of the month during the month in question. That goes for the final month of the year as much as any other.

As for the authority question, I can't imagine putting out a list of my own even if I had done more work. I've found that I need 3 listens to settle on a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down. My opinion changes frequently before that point and almost never beyond it. But to rate a group of albums empirically against each other would require several more hearings of each. And of course, I'm not talking about listening in the car or while making dinner; the music needs to be the sole object of your attention if you're going to claim any authority whatsoever, even to yourself. (When I say "empirically," of course I don't mean "for everyone for all time," but I think that within your own aesthetic, you can certainly be clinical in going about this kind of thing. If you don't, you end up fooled.) This is not at all to say that you are not listening for pleasure or that you are otherwise contriving some foreign mode of perception; indeed, distracted listening is the most unfulfilling and foreign mode for me. I recommend the opposite.

So, have these critics sampled even several hundred of the several thousand new jazz records that have come out this year? Have they devoted ca. 5 hours of calm listening time to each? That's getting into the thousands of hours already, an average of 3-4 hours every single day of the year, and you figure at some point for work or play they will want to listen to something from last year or earlier as well. I doubt that all of these numbers are nearly this high, though one or two of them might be (just a hunch, but I suspect it's the total number of records that's high and the number of spins that's low). I think lists which are constructed with authority are entertaining and sometimes even highly informative, but I have to be suspicious of the year-enders. Even if the critics themselves are authorities, the task they've chosen is one which under present conditions simply cannot be achieved authoritatively.

Classical music is, of course, a different and much more difficult situation. Maybe I really am living in the dark, but I've long been struck by the differences between how jazz and classical musicians go about their business. I think classical music badly needs an "underground" scene. I think classically trained players need to stop taking as a given that it's only a matter of time before they land a $200,000 a year gig playing in a top 5 orchestra. I think they then need to be willing to get to work building something better without the promise of an immediate union scale paycheck. String quartets playing Metallica covers in a classical style for coffee shop yuppies is not "underground." Jazz, its precarious condition notwithstanding, still has an underground. There are still compelling jazz performances and records being made in places and by people that the NEA and the yuppie DINKs they survey can't wrap their heads around. Can you say that about classical music? I can't. I see the same slick coating as the jazz world without the underground bearings that have kept it alive in contravention of so many professional listmakers' dire predictions. And I see a clear and simple explanation for this in the petit bourgeois self-importance of so many classical musicians. Jazz players collectively are not perfect, they are not saints, and of course they are getting more bourgeois by the day and will surely have to face this issue soon enough, but right this minute, their tradition is alive because they go underground and eat ramen when they have to. Meanwhile, the classical brats are floating higher and away, sipping merlot in a hot air balloon that's on fire. So I applaud the jazz critics' for including in their year-end lists music that was actually created this year! That means someone thought to make it, found a way to realize it, and got it into their hands. We should try it, classical folk. Grab your flannel shirts and PBR and let's get the fuck down to business already.

Who Are You and What Are You Doing In My Bookmarks?

Hmm...what other blogger-like behaviors can I feign for the next 24 hours in order to make it to the end of this project? Well, how about a little Link 'n' Run?

For reasons I seem to have forgotten, these blogs found their way into my bookmarks at some point in the past. Checking them out months (possibly years?) later, I'm impressed enough to recommend them here, which I normally don't do. Long live Blog Month...


•TeledyN

An interesting read with a range of interests and rate of activity which seem to match my own quite closely.


•Schoenberg

In particular, see this post for a fascinating story with a surprise ending. If you find this inspiring, I want to be your friend. If not, you can't be my friend anymore.


•Big Mouths

Go here for an epic and thought provoking missive "about composers and history, about how the past is ineluctably linked to the instantiation of the future, an instantiation we generally call the present." Now this is blogging!


•Alphabet Soup

Some timely reflections on the new music scene. And if for some reason you can't get enough of me from my own blog, I've spilled my guts here about an experience I had entering a competition.


It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack)
(Actually, I've been on to this one for a while, but I want to mention it anyway).

Stanley Jason Zappa "attacks" (in a good way) the only Adorno essay I thought I understood with sharp wit, contemporary perspective, and LOTS of highlighting. "Corporate Boppers and Performance Art Poseurs?" I am in all likelihood the only CalArts student who thinks that's funny (hilarious, actually).

Blogkeeping

For the first time in a while, I've done some tweaking around here:

•The toolbar has been adjusted to match the color scheme as well as possible within the absurdly limited range of possibilities provided by the template.

•The title of the blog has been shortened from "My Fickle Ears Dig It" to simply "Fickle Ears," and the information immediately below has gone from alliterative to merely authorial. Let's face it, we're all sick and tired of the standard issue blogospheric shtick, and no one more than me, a point I continue to belabor here. Even so, it is surprisingly difficult to avoid slipping back into common-practice blogging, so in a fleeting lucid moment, I've opted to up the austerity factor yet another notch. If anyone was genuinely curious about the original title, it's something I blurted out once in a band rehearsal after the first complete run-through of a difficult new tune I'd brought in. As with most such statements, we thought it much funnier at the time than it really is, and it only took me five years to realize that the shortened version is a better title for a blog.

•Similarly, I'm now strictly an anonymous "follower" of the few blogs to which I've subscribed through Blogger's built-in reader. I quit Facebook in a moment of clarity and pretty soon I've started creating another social network without even noticing? What the fuck? I prefer to follow blogs through good old-fashioned browser bookmarks which I capture while reading comment threads and clicking on the profiles of contributors who seem to have something timely to add to the conversation. I'll still be keeping my Blogger subscriptions simply for old time's sake as I can't imagine a drawback to doing so anonymously, though I'm sure to think of one soon. Anyway, if you are one of those authors and just saw me disappear from your followers list, (a) get a life, and (b) I promise I'm still reading you, even though you don't have a life.

•I've just discovered (probably years late as usual) that Blogger has a built-in stats page. As the kids say, LOL!!! I can't seem to get it to stop counting my own activity towards page views and the like, even though there's an option to disable this, so who knows about some of the numbers. The most perplexing? Supposedly, 81% of my pageviews (One word? Further LOL...) are on Windows and only 14% on Mac. I find that pretty hard to believe. Spambots?...REPUBLICANS?

Walling

I continue to meet classically-trained brass players who also play cooler music on cooler instruments quite well, but who have built a wall between the two endeavors. None of them are happy about it. What gives, y'all? You've done all the hard work! Crossing over should be easy.

I was a brass specialist by 8th grade and a tuba specialist by 11th. I kick myself harder and harder over it as the years go on and my piano chops remain flaccid. Yet this also meant that I had no choice but to pursue the music I was interested in on the only instrument I was able to play well enough to do so. And of course, it was never in question whether the tuba and I were right for each other, even if other pairings could conceivably have worked out just as well. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that strings were not in the cards, though. I don't know how anybody plays those cursed things.)

In any case, I suspect our pedagogy is at fault. Brass playing in every style needs to become an art again (if it ever was before) rather than a craft. When it does, we will own our complete musical personalities on any instrument on which we have attained sufficient technique to do so. Walling will be a thing of the past.

The Transient Repertoire

I've forgotten where exactly, but somewhere or other among all the blogtastic drivel I've consumed over the past couple of weeks was an archetypal lament of the lack of recent compositions by living jazz artists which have truly entered the repertoire. It is indeed unfortunate in a sense, and yet at the same time, one wonders if this is simply a paradox inherent in the jazz tradition itself. Jazz is creative music, and as such, most everyone who plays it also composes for themselves (and rarely, if ever, for others; that's another interesting discussion). Performer-Composer is much more than a "traditional" mold towards which most musicians gravitate; it is essentially demanded of you by all kinds of circumstances inherent to this tradition. The inhibition of repertory momentum is built-in, paradoxically, by this emphasis on multi-faceted creativity.

You could say that there certainly is still a repertoire, and that it certainly has begun to ossify, but I can't help but wonder if this isn't the most incisive way to look at it. For one thing, the basic unit of currency in jazz repertoire has always been the particular performance, not just the lead sheet: Coltrane's and Hawkins' performances of "Body and Soul" are, of course, discrete items for today's players and listeners to tackle. In addition, within the most traditional circles, one could argue that the highly derivative nature of the compositions simply represents a different slant on repertoire, one by which the unit of currency is, again, a smaller one than the lead sheet: in other words, licks, chord progressions, and song forms. Perhaps this work doesn't so much enter the repertoire because it is the repertoire ground up and reconstituted with less new material added than might be expected in, say, the classical compositional tradition. By this logic, neo-traditionalism can be understood as a necessary "sausage-making" process that each generation (perhaps each musician) is tasked with, and as long as the "innovation" is happening concurrently somewhere else, this in and of itself cannot be a bad thing.

Having said all of that, I hereby nominate Buster Williams' "Christina" and Dave Holland's "The Balance" for repertory status. Damn it would be nice to be able to call either of those at a session...

A Further Appeal To Time-Honored Literary Devices (i.e. MAD LIBS!!!)

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


An Open Letter To My Dissenters On Why Classical Isn’t Cool Anymore

Stefan Andrew Lord Kac, with apologies to Nicholas "The Cherub" Payton

(and previously, if briefly, Professor Gann)




Let me make one thing clear. I am not dissing an art form. I am dissing the name, Classical. Just like being called Cracker affected how White people felt about themselves at one time, I believe the term "CLASSICAL" affects the style of playing. I am not a Cracker and I am not a Classical musician.
What do Claude Debussy, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Kyle Gann (LOL!!!) and myself share in common? A disdain for Classical. I am reintroducing a talk to the table of a conversation that my ancestors wanted to have a long time ago. It is on their shoulders that I stand.
"Classical" is an oppressive colonialist slave-owner term and I want no parts of it. If Classical wasn’t a slave, why did Cage try to free it? Classical is not music, it is an idea that hasn’t served any of us well. It saddens me most that some of my friends can’t see that. Some of y’all who know me and I’ve even employed, stood on the bandstand with, know how important tradition is to me. My work speaks to that.

This Is Most Decidedly Not Any Kind of Rant

For all those who say I’m on a crazed, cranky, angry, dark rant. There is nothing crazed, cranky, angry or dark about what I write, but a lot of this hate energy I’ve received online truly is. Someone has even gone as far as to deem me the Nicholas Payton of Classical?

You know what the most offensive part of that statement is to me?

The “CLASSICAL” part.
I’m trying to save this music and folks are straight lambasting me. The saving grace is, for the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly favorable and it’s here where I choose to focus my gaze. I’m sacrificing myself for the greater good of post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music and some of you are calling me names, and I’m the angry one?
Most of these folks don’t even know me, but yet they have a strong dislike for Stefan Andrew Lord Kac. I am a human being, not some internet bot. When you hold an intense dislike for someone you don’t know, it means that somewhere down deep inside, you have an intense dislike for yourself.
Please take at look at yourselves. What are you doing to save this music? Are you out there earning meaningless masters degrees from fancy-pants art schools and enjoying the California sunshine in December honing your skills for the next trumpet player to take you for a fool on the basketball court, or are you just functioning under the guise of what you have been fed for many years and are told is the way things have to be?

You can dislike me or what I say all you want, but it doesn’t stop what I said from being true. It only disturbs you this deeply because it dismantles everything you’ve built your life upon. As I've stated on my blog, “CLASSICAL” is resistant to change. It wants to hold on to the old way of doing things, even if they’ve proven to not work.
What are you so afraid of? That you actually might have to think for yourself? That you will be responsible for the information that has been passed down from generation to generation though the lineage? That you have to live up to the great legacy this music demands?
I challenge my dissenters to really be an individual and stand alone in the face of everyone telling you that you’re wrong, crazy and can’t do it. That’s what Schoenberg did. That’s what Cage did. Are you willing? Are you able? Are you ready? Only a few can really do it and my blog makes that clear. It ain’t for everybody. So, go on, continue to box yourself in a label that was designed to marginalize White musicians and cut them off from their brilliance.

pBAAJMM!

When post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music became “CLASSICAL”, it separated itself from the European folk music idiom. I’m just trying to take it back to its roots. European folk music has been separated from its root (what you call Classical) and, as a result, all of the branches of the tree are dying. White music is dying and I’m trying to help save it. Turn on the radio, if you don’t believe me. How many Classical records that have come out in the last 5 years that you’ve really loved?
I do as much to support this music as most of you. I don’t just come online and bitch about the state about this music. I spew real and actual vitriol at the art and its artists and here I have to see some of you tear me down and say I’m killing the blogosphere? When it is some of you who want to hold on to an oppressive idea that doesn’t serve post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music who are the true murderers.
The music was just fine before it was called Classical and will be just fine without the name.

There is nothing to be afraid of except yourselves.

I am Stefan Andrew Lord Kac and I play post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music.

Nicholas Payton plays more horn than I do, but mine is BIGGER!

pBAAJMM!


(the giant on whose shoulders I stand)

An aside in the form of comic relief

Thanks to Christmas, I'm now the proud owner of one of these:



Look out Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.

Occupation of the Mind, Part 2

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


NP continues:

The 99% is simply about a class of Whites aligning themselves with the impoverished they didn’t give a shit about until they, too, were broke. Am I supposed to care now that you’ve had a “come to Jesus” moment and want to say it’s all about us? Us didn’t become “us” until a faction of people felt the burn who never felt it. They didn’t give a shit when it was “just us”, so now I don’t give a shit. Justice. How does that song go, “Cry Me A River”?

At the heart of this statement lies what white culture might call an "old world" view of ancestry and cultural inheritance. In other words, you are a living representative of your entire lineage whether you like it or not, and their deeds and misdeeds alike are yours as well. I'm not oblivious to the backstory here, and yet I also have trouble seeing this worldview resulting in anything less than a permanent impasse in the getting along department. Because I'll never meet a German who helped exterminate the Jewish side of my family, I can't see any reason to put all of that on any given German indiscriminately until one who had nothing to do with it can be cowed into a contrite gesture of my choosing. From my middle-class white American vantage point, there's no rational justification for this, nor can I anticipate anything constructive coming of it. And to meet a random, unexpected contrite gesture with "so now I don't give a shit" would simply be to throw salt in the wounds.

So yes, Mr. Payton, we presently feel the burn, and only more acutely with your comments. In jazz as in life, the options are few for us modern-day pale folk who aspire to be part of the solution: apathy is complicity, activism is sour grapes; we are thieves if we imitate black music too closely, or ingrates if we do not imitate it closely enough; and the happy medium in both cases is a pinball of a moving target. It is a worldview by which culpability and victimry alike become genetic traits, and where each generation takes with them to the grave their children's hope for reconciliation along with their own. I think we can do better without forgetting our history, and I'm ready when you are.

Occupation of the Mind, Part 1

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


Here's NP waxing resentful on the Occupy movement.

The "Carpetbagger" item is intriguing. I think might know some, actually. Unfortunately, they do not just make pilgrimages to New Orleans, but indeed bring their "discoveries" home with them and try to claim some sort of direct line. The music is often embarrassing and the gesture borders on the offensive. So I'm with you there, NP. Some soul-searching and ton more time in the woodshed would do these busybodies good.

Now...

"Why are people occupying the streets when the only person capable of keeping you from your dreams is you? The Occupy movement is a distraction and will not yield anything but more confusion. There is no “machine” to fight against. We are in the dark because people are asleep to their own light. Cure the internal war within and the war without instantly vanishes.

We’ve worked from the outside in for centuries and still have not completely resolved the bigger issues. Grand gestures make great headlines, but the real healing takes place on an individual level.

"The internal war," huh? Sounds about right. We all have one, and we should absolutely fight it in the way that you describe. Is that it, though? Collective action is dead? Really? Since the 1960's? I'd like to believe you. I'm an introvert. I'm good at fighting internal battles and virtually incapable of being part of a collective anything. But comfort be damned, I can't agree with you on this, and I would, with all due respect, raise the question of Abolitionism first and foremost. How would that have gone without a little bit of collective action, public debate and well-timed violence thrown in? Not a direct analogy? I'm not so sure. The Pro-Slavery side certainly took great pains to specifically inhibit the formation of collective consciousness and action alike among their slaves. They feared it, and they were right to. They were cowards and they were outnumbered. Even failing any more specific similarities, I think the same can absolutely be said about modern-day Wall Street. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Poonpuff FAQ for the e-Nihilists in the room (as well as any and all past/present/future MFEDI readers whose e-worldview necessitates such overt clarifications of purpose and method be made again and again regarding this and the few other constructive, well-written weblogs about music and musicians)


WHEEEEW, okay...


ahem...



Dear Angry Reader With Better Things To Do Than Sit Around Reading Some Young White Asshole's Weblog,

Before attacking my motives for joining the Post-Nicholas Payton Foofaraw (PNPF or "Poonpuff"), for making any particular argument therein, and/or for having this blog in the first place, I would humbly ask you to consider the following clarifications of purpose and method, issued at the outset of my joining the PNPF and applicable to all subsequent statements made on this topic.


(1) You're not qualified to disagree with someone who "plays more horn" than you do. Who do you think you are, anyway?

While NP indeed plays more horn than I do, mine is bigger.

In all seriousness, I graciously defer to NP and similarly accomplished individuals (if any others exist) on matters which are directly informed by one's degree of musical skill and/or career success, such as issues of instrumental technique, music criticism, marketing/career advice, practice habits, etc. However, any generalizations (music-related or otherwise) about a group of which I am a member (e.g. "white people" or "all these kids with music degrees") are fair game for rebuttal because they require no further qualifications than (a) that I be a member of the group(s) in question, and (b) that I tell the truth about myself. Under those circumstances, no musical skill whatsoever is required to be qualified to make such a rebuttal, even to a highly skilled musician such as NP. Were I to make a blanket generalization about "black people" or "New Orleans cats," don't you think NP and all other members of those respective groups would be qualified to rebut my statement?



(2) But...you're...white. WTF is up with that shit?

Guilty. Can't change it, and unlike many white classmates growing up, I never tried. If it's relevant (and I'm not saying it is; only you can decide), I did go to an elementary school from 1st through 5th grade where blacks outnumbered whites by more than 2-to-1; I have spent hundreds of hours of my life on the basketball court (one of NP's hallowed proving grounds, which is the only reason I bring it up) outnumbered by a similar margin; I did continue to volunteer (albeit in fits and starts) on the Northside of Minneapolis long after I finished high school there; believe it or not, a good high school friend of mine declared another friend and I "blacker than some [black people]" even though we didn't talk, act or dress like him; and of course, it goes without saying that a good number of my strongest musical influences are African-Americans. These are mere facts about my life experience. They do not grant me any kind of authority to speak about racial issues that I would not otherwise be thought to have. By relating them here, I simply hope to convince anyone who is not otherwise inclined to believe so that I care and that black people are real and human to me. You don't have to believe me, but that is the truth. That's all I've got for you on that front.

Hence, if you see fit to comment on something I wrote (which I welcome), I would appreciate the common intellectual courtesy of having this articulated in terms of the content of the argument in question, not in terms of my supposed qualifications (or lack thereof) to make it based on overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member (e.g. "young white assholes" or "academically trained white musicians from the Upper Midwest who, surprisingly, can also hold their own on the basketball court") when these generalizations may or may not actually be reflected in my specific case, and indeed, when you clearly have no possible way of knowing if they are reflected in my case or not based solely on an argument I have put forward about music and the world immediately surrounding it. There certainly are "qualifications" I do not and cannot possess, and I promise never to speak as if I possess them; I am, however, eminently qualified to evaluate overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member, no matter who made them or what they are. At that point, any further psychoanalysis of my identity, while perhaps relevant to other, broader discussions, is moot to the particular argument I've made about music and the world immediately surrounding it. And that's why we're all here. Just the facts, ma'am.



(3) Gee, that's a mouthful, Socrates. If you're a musician, why don't you go practice/study/listen/compose instead of writing a pointless blog about your white angst?

Like you, I'm darn close to being a Nihilist at this point, but not completely. The ethical issues surrounding music still matter enough to me to devote a small bit of my time to considering them publicly. This is wholly a matter of (a) self-interest (i.e. since I have to live and work in this world just like NP and everyone else who makes music, and therefore would like to see it improved wherever possible), and (b) the sense that such "improvements" are, frequently, so fucking obvious to a majority of us and thus quite easily attainable if only more of us were to give them proper consideration using adequately precise terminology and more than 140 characters where needed. As you no doubt know based on your wording of the above question, most blogs fall short of meeting this need; this is where I come in.

If I had no self-interest in seeing a better musical world, or if I thought it was a wholly untenable proposition, then no, I absolutely would not bother. There are other areas of life that I feel are lost causes in this way (see: Congress, U.S.), but music is not one of them. I believe that music is trivial in comparison to these other areas, and therefore that it is easier to fix. Only a small percentage of these musical issues do I choose to explore publicly. The rest I keep to myself and seldom write down; thus, the content here is already heavily edited and pared down to its essence. You are absolutely entitled to judge it to be a waste of your time, but not a waste of my own; the latter is for myself alone to judge. Know that I spend quite a bit of time reading blogs as well as writing them, and have thus developed a very low tolerance for vacuous garbage masquerading as musicology. My activities here are always directed towards achieving something more vital and useful. Even during my annual "Blog Month" project (which is presently in effect), during which I force myself to blog daily for a month regardless of whether I feel I have something just this important to say, I am after two things I believe to be constructive objectives: one is to throw myself a change-up, knowing that I sometimes become a different writer when forced to work constantly; and the other is to critique the vacuous garbage referred to above through the time-honored literary device of satire.

Sounds like fun, huh? None of this is a burden on my direct music-making endeavors, from which I, like virtually every other musician, need occasional respite anyway. In fact, blogging has frequently allowed me to bring fresh motivation to these endeavors at times when it has been lacking. (Knowing that more people would take your blog seriously if you "played more horn," while not necessarily right, certainly provides some motivation, doesn't it?) It isn't hard to find bloggers and trolls whose musical lives are out of balance in this way, but I do not consider myself to be one of them. If you do consider me to be one, I would like to know on what intimate knowledge of my inner thoughts you base this observation, and also what you are doing wasting your time with my senseless rants? It must be more complicated than misery loving company...

a foofaraw over a kerfuffle about a boondoggle

Longtime MFEDI readers know the drill by this time: I post misinformed rants about pop music while the real issues are discussed elsewhere by more important people on their more important blogs, are then commented on extensively by the people I malign here, and are noted by me, if at all, only weeks, months or years later after I've had a chance to catch up on the gory details, by which time comment threads have been closed, libel suits filed, and any further attempt to get a word in edgewise merely dismissed as self-important "intellectual land prospecting." Ah yes, long live the blogosphere, the first (and I hope last) vehicle of human discourse where it is neither what you said nor how you said it that matter, but rather when!

So it is, again, with the Nic Payton skirmish, and here I am late to the party as usual, still young, white, middle class and accredited, just like I was before, still with a blog and a project of my own invention whereby I intend to post on it daily for a month, and presented with yet another eminent black musician who I have great respect for saying a few things I agree with alongside many more things that make me want to quit playing music altogether and go back to working at the airport. You could argue that the worst thing I could do under these circumstances would be to get involved; indeed, there superficially seems to be nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. By dint of both a deeper interpretation of the possibilities and a spectacular lack of willpower, I hereby declare my intent (to be withdrawn whenever I see fit) to enter the fray. In part by choice but also by necessity on some levels, this will take place here rather than elsewhere until further notice. The next post will explain in more detail why I feel justified in doing this, and will be linked to at the top of each subsequent post on the topic in order to anticipate the usual nihilistic barbs.

(FYI, Payton's blog is here. Further links omitted; you're smart enough to follow the trail.)

Also, closed-circuit to Sean Roderick: where's Sean Roderick when you need him? If you're out there reading, I want your reaction (on or off the record) as this discussion unfolds.

Knowledge as a function of volition

"create your own systems based on what you know"

So reads one of the myriad scrawlings on the inside of a practice room door here at The Herb Alpert School of Music at The California Institute of the Arts. Current and recent CalArtians will surely know the door in question, and probably laugh heartily at me for sweating it enough to warrant a blog entry, even during a Blog Month. Not to be deterred, I forge ahead with my critique anyway. Vandalism and postings are policed rather closely here, no doubt due to things getting out of hand at some point in the recent past (not hard to imagine), but for whatever reason, this door lives a charmed life, perhaps an amnesty gesture of sorts by The Institute towards the many mystically-inclined poor spellers which inhabit it each weekday in search of enlightenment through four-part chorales and species counterpoint. Whatever the reason, the door boasts an ever growing collection of poorly delivered bathroom humor, notably more skillfully executed drawings (this is, after all, an art school) and the occasional attempt at a deep thought, attempts which seldom fail to betray at least a hint of the resentment which inspired them.

I seldom use this room, but each time I do, I'm reminded of the above line, and it bothers me more each time. It was one of the first I noticed, my eyes drawn inexplicably to it from the start despite its relatively plain and small appearance among other monstrosities. At first, I located the crux of my discomfort in the word "systems," being as I am utterly unmoved by most Systems Music, as well as highly suspicious of (if not occasionally fascinated by) serial procedures. In the broader sense, though, it's a more harmless word: almost anything could be a system, including my own open instrumentation templates and letter-and-number based cataloguing (not titling) of works. As time has gone on, I've realized that it is the second half of the statement which is truly dangerous: "...based on what you know."

This is, for one thing, superfluous, and for another, potentially stifling as well. Given the broadest possible meaning of "systems," any you create will inevitably be "based on what you know." (as opposed to...what you don't know?) More importantly, though, "what you know" is not a fixed, bounded concept! You have the ability not only to purposefully choose to expand your knowledge, but to use that which you already possess to guide this search in a way that best serves your objectives. Conversely, I can't help but read this statement as implying causality; in other words, that the time to create your own systems is when you're just sick and tired of learning new stuff, or likewise, that the time to stop learning new stuff is when you decide you want to create your own systems. This reeks of the militant ignorance of pop culture, where "The Beatles didn't read music, so why should I?"* or "Music lessons are for people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves." Think about it: by the time you are playing in a band, even if you've never had formal study, you've learned something somewhere along the way; by implication then, to claim that you have arrived at that perfect amount of knowledge whereby what you have so far is enough but any more would divest you of your individuality and ruin your work is an awfully big leap. I mean really, how unlikely is it that this very day, right that fucking moment when someone asked you the question, that was the moment when you found the magical balance between thinking and feeling that almost no artist in history has ever found? Come the fuck on people.

create evolve your own systems based on what you know your evolving experience

Maybe? I don't know. Now it's contrived, but you get my point. It takes more than a door out of view of the authorities and a flash of hatred for virtuosi to tackle this kind of thing. For now, I'm choosing to leave my mark on the blogosphere rather than on the back of a practice room door.


*Is this really true about The Beatles? I'd been led to believe otherwise, but I don't know for sure. BTW, I'm paraphrasing the quote but not fabricating the sentiment; someone (who shall remain nameless) actually expressed this to me once.

The Blogosphere, Post-Big-Bang

It has been a full year since I conducted a proper blogospheric round-up, which consists of allocating a couple of weeks worth of my "spare" time to trudging through my bookmarks (yes, I still do it that way for the most part) until I either get sick of it or I reach the shitlist at the bottom (i.e. blogs that have gone dormant or that I've otherwise determined are not worth my time, most typically because they suckered me in with one erudite post about Stravinsky's serial music but turn out to be more often concerned with pets and progeny). Feeds are just further oppressive tools of common practice blogging, whereby the latest is by default the greatest; bookmarks, meanwhile, are sortable and anonymous, which I like. So anyway, I've not been all the way through them in quite a while, and having now gotten a good head start, I'm tempted to conclude (non-empirically so far) that the blogosphere, like the universe, appears to be contracting. I'm sure that the sheer number of extant blogs continues to grow, but the activity on them seems to be slowing down in general (including, I should admit, here as well). Is it possible we are getting closer to my wet dream of a blogosphere where no one posts unless they have something really earth-shattering and well-constructed to say? Not really. I do sense that some fat has been trimmed, but it's not a proportionate amount to the overall decline in production. (Plus, holding Blog Month even just once a year pretty much upsets this particular apple cart, doesn't it?) If the fad has passed, though, that's fine with me. It was overdue.

Winter Break Stuff

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

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



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

And now for something completely different:



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

Agency

As long as we're alive and expect to have a hand in it, why bother attempting to predict "The Future of Music?" Go make it what you want it to be.

first only next

Just one x-mas music gig this year, earlier tonight with the youth symphony at a Korean Church in Northridge. In previous years, added to my other x-mas music commitments, this could have been torturous; in fact, with just one on the calendar this year (and some "real" music filling out the program), it was tolerable verging on fun.

Would you believe that I've had two paying orchestral gigs here already? My FIRST two paying orchestral gigs of any kind ever? After less than four months? Without knowing anyone? After never having had a single one back home? Not even with a pickup group or as a ringer with a youth orchestra? Are you kidding? This is mundane stuff, but its more use than I ever was to any orchestra in Minneapolis. Call me bitter for saying so, or laugh at me for bothering to make note of it here, but it's a fact and I just can't help but wonder. You'd think I would have stumbled into one single solitary gig back home at some point. Did I do too good a job of marketing myself as a jazz player? Is there just that little work back home? Is it nothing more than sheer coincidence? SoCal will surely humble me yet, but I'll be pondering all of this yet more intently if it continues.

An Unlikely Whiner Responds

If I may be permitted to lift the moratorium on CalArts "issues" for just another day...

As of yesterday afternoon, an anonymous open letter-ish document obviously written by a student has been posted sparingly but consistently around the building chiding students (all of us, apparently) for three main transgressions: the "hipster thing," a lack of personal respect for one another, and excessive complaining about the state of the Institute.

Without quoting the letter verbatim, I'll say that the first two points resonated very much with me based on my experiences here over the past three and a half months. The third, however, rings quite hollow, and not because there is not a lot of visible complaining going on here. To call it "complaining" rather than "criticism" or "unrest" frames the issue negatively from the start, and not in a way that I feel is particularly accurate. While there is certainly some whining here, as there is at every school I've attended, most of my direct acquaintances are able to articulate their grievances (and they all have some) quite a bit more cogently than I've witnessed before, and I rarely disagree with them (also unusual). This, however, is incidental to the larger argument expressed in this section of the letter, namely that we should all just shut up and go along with however the Institute decides to do things, and that this is somehow the only way to conserve the legendary CalArts...thing, whatever it actually is (and if it still exists in the first place, which I'm not at all convinced that it does).

Pardon me for saying so, but unless I'm badly mistaken, the original CalArts...thing could not reasonably be said to have had such blind reverence for authority, could it? And surely if no one had thought to agitate (including "complaining," if you insist on calling it that) for something like CalArts, it would never have existed in the first place. Given all of that, I think it's incumbent upon all of us here to speak up when something isn't working, especially when we can all see an obvious solution. I would not want to attend a school nor live in a world where any such individual is written off as a mere "complainer" while administrators and bureaucrats run amok.

The question of my potential involvement in any sort of "movement" to improve CalArts has been on my mind for several weeks. I am very conflicted about it: my time at the U of MN essentially sapped me of all will to undertake such ventures, not to mention any faith that they could ever succeed in even the smallest way. I have already sat down face-to-face with a few administrators, written them letters, tasted their evasive answers, lived their poor decisions, watched the carousel turn, and marveled at the uniformity of thought and action from one to the next. I also realize that most if not all of the problems I am most concerned with here really are bigger than CalArts, and that fighting them on that level, even if it were effective, would be a waste of time in the grand geo-political and socio-economic scheme of things. So in a sense, I can't blame anyone for simply checking out and investing their time in their work (and/or some real community activism if they're so inclined). Even so, let's not quit our whining just yet. As bad as things ever look, I have to think they'd look a lot worse if we simply accepted them on blind faith.

Humor

Whereas the place of humor in concert music is relatively secure, the types of humor appropriate to given musical demands and the degree, in both frequency and intensity, to which one might properly appeal to them in a musical work can still be contentious issues. For years in Minneapolis, I've frequently encountered a particular strain of humor among musicians which I find counterproductive and distasteful. Finding it in evidence here at CalArts in almost identical form, I'm compelled to attempt an analysis.

One most often encounters this type of humor in student work, but it is by no means limited to students, and occasionally ends up being consolidated into something even more stifling and insidious, if often subtle, in more mature work. I would label it Resentful Humor, or Humor as a Defense Mechanism. To be sure, it is sometimes hard to know whether one is observing a constructive criticism of someone or something, or simply a childish display of petty resentment and insecurity. It is by no means unusual, though, to know immediately, and among those clear-cut cases that I have witnessed, the majority have been of the latter type.

The telltale characteristics of this dynamic are not necessarily unique to it, and are seldom present all at once; hence, there is no airtight formula for determining its presence or absence. That being said, here are what I perceive to be its primary fingerprints:

(1) Humor is overused.
I am referring here not to the emotive intensity of the humor, but to its pervasiveness throughout the work, thereby comprising a substantially larger portion of the piece's content than any obvious structural or aesthetic necessity would seem to dictate.

(2) Humor is used purely to fill time.
In a sense, this is just one particular instance of (1), but its ubiquity earns it a category of its own. It is more or less specific to improvised settings, but is observable in all types of them (i.e. harmonic-structural, totally free, and everything in between). In structured settings, this is a way to "just get through" a final chorus; in freer contexts, it is typically the end result of a gradual devolvement of focus and intention, to the point where the player(s) don't know what to do, but, contra Miles, insist on doing something anyway. (Yes, those same dozen jazz-world anecdotes do get tiresome, but seriously, don't you think Miles hit this one more squarely on the head than maybe even he could have imagined? And if his own sense of humor was ever in question, is this not due as much to his restraint in appealing to it as to his infamously surly stage presence?)

(3) The aesthetic dimension of the work is wholly incidental to the gesture of mocking/deriding a particular piece, composer, band or musical style.
Here I am referring to something beyond (or perhaps falling short of) parody or satire, devices which I would take to entail a certain sophistication, and which can be directed at extramusical targets as well as musical ones. Conversely, I would define the particular dynamic in question here as unequivocally about music, and also unapologetically inelegant, often resorting, conceptually at least, to brute force in order to make a disproportionately simple point. And as with the previous items on this list, the void where any more specific musical intent or personal/spiritual necessity might normally exist is palpable.

(4) The work is "epic."
Obviously, this is the most subjective thing on this list, but I see it everywhere, and conveniently, there's a word for it that you might even hear it uttered before or after the concert. Don't quote me as I'm an avowed homebody with a phobia of pop culture, but it seems to me that events which occur outside the realm of idle leisure and/or affect people other than the utterer seldom qualify as "epic." This usage is, I suppose, a sarcastic gesture in and of itself, the reclamation of an ultra-serious-sounding word on behalf of all things inane, kind of like bad meaning good, but more complicated than that (and obviously incubated in a very different subculture). "Epic" is inherently conflicted in nature, complimentary on the surface while always a touch self-depricating-verging-on-resentful on its deeper levels. It is laughing both with and at oneself rolled in one gesture, perhaps ultimately unsure of which, if either, is more deserved. Not all music we might dub "epic" in post-concert small-talk is of the resentful type, but all of the resentful music I am attempting to describe could reasonably be labeled "epic" given the current (and no doubt temporary) meaning of this promiscuous piece of slang.

Having voiced my contempt for this resentful, "epic" music, I'll grant that if it is truly your music, then you should go make it. Study it, nurture it, and consolidate it until it reaches rapturous heights of bitterness and inelegance. If you have something important to say that can only be said by mocking the Count Basie rhythm section, then that's your work and you should go do it. If improvised music is a blank slate for us to explore who we really are and you thereby discover yourself to be a masturbating parakeet who can't stop laughing hysterically at itself, then more power to you. Resentment runs rampant in our musical culture, and you shouldn't let anyone else tell you whether or not yours is justified. As for the healthy bit of resentment I myself harbor towards much of the world, "epic" obstinate crudity strikes me as among the least constructive of the possible responses. Such works do nothing to remedy any petty misjudgments or outrageous injustices that might have inspired them; if anything, they gratify the perpetrators, who get to watch their victims writhe impotently with anger rather than channel it constructively into the kind of work that might someday do future generations the favor of exposing them.