Yeah, but is it Pop?

I soon realized that in the course of the previous discussion on pop, I omitted an important predilection of mine that happens to come from the pop world, that being Jimi Hendrix. Not that I'm any kind of Hendrix expert, but I do seriously dig his music. I'd venture that Hendrix's appeal is almost as universal as The Beatles', and also that it's more universal than the Beatles' among people who also happen to like atonal, modernist, and/or avant-garde music (whatever that is). If Dan had asked about Hendrix instead of the Beatles, he would have essentially been asking the same thing about me, I think, but he would have gotten a very different (and yes, probably shorter) answer, and that whole discussion would have gone in a completely different direction. Oh well.

For what it's worth, brass quintets, wedding bands, jazz combos, and pops orchestras don't cover Hendrix nearly as excessively as they cover The Beatles. That's no doubt in large part because they also do so far less successfully and they know it. Rock musicians have significantly less shame about imitating Hendrix, though they probably shouldn't. The Beatles certainly had their extramusical trials and tribulations, but perhaps Hendrix's were more well-known as they happened, and more of the kind that aren't typically discussed in polite company. I think all of these things probably factor into why The Beatles's music is seemingly thought to transcend instrumentation the way Bach's does, while Hendrix is just as popular but not covered as often or as well. I'd like to think that I could separate my own unpleasant experiences with poor imitations of an artist from my overall opinion of them, and certainly that I could prevent extramusical issues from coloring that opinion, but I'm human, and that may not be the case here. I really don't know. Gil Evans did an album of Hendrix's music that left me cold (frigid, in fact), but I still dig the original.

Stevie Wonder is an artist that many jazz musicians have covered, from Dave Pietro to Joe Gilman to The New Power Trio to Dan's own group Frankhouse. I'm not so set in my ways that I ignore and deny these kinds of trends. In fact, as I've said, the more pop music I can find that I actually like, the less I'll feel like a social outcast, and that can only be a good thing. And if so many otherwise like-minded people are into something, you'd think that would be a hint worth taking. To that end, I had the chance to investigate a Stevie Wonder box set while housesitting for a friend last year. When I saw it sitting on the rack, I got really excited. This was my chance! Well, I had to stop listening after a while. It just wasn't for me. It's galling in a way, yet not entirely surprising that while I really dig many of the jazz covers of his music that I've heard, I couldn't make it through an entire disc of the originals. Too bad for me, I guess.

I mentioned before that prog rock seems to float my boat. I'm not sure that really counts as pop music, though. Some pop people spew even more venom at prog rock than they do at classical music and jazz. It not only incorporates many elements of those more high-falutin' styles, but also hits closer to home by virtue of still being rooted, if not in some small way, in the rock and/or pop aesthetic(s). I was perusing some blogs that I don't get around to reading all that often and stumbled on a couple of posts over at Acousmata about a couple of prog groups I didn't know about:

Magma

Univers Zero

I dig both of these tracks a lot, and I'll definitely be investigating both of these bands' work more extensively at some point.

It's hard to talk intelligently about structure when you've only listened to something one time, but if there are profound large-scale structural concepts worthy of a classical musicologist's attention at work here, I missed them the first time. In fact, while I definitely dug the Univers Zero track more, the scattered nature of the structure bothered me a bit. That's usually my first and only complaint about the prog bands I'm into, which scares me, because for a long time, I resented the classical approach to form and believed in, essentially, doing what you want in that respect. It's not doing Kyle Gann's writing any sort of justice to lump him in with the clunky statement I just made, but if you read his blog, you know that he's written intelligently and repeatedly about composers (himself included) who have rebelled against such traditional formal strictures. What scares me is that while I nod in agreement when I read things like that, and always have, nonetheless, as I get older and listen to and write more music, I find myself hurtling towards the traditional perspective. It's bizarre.

By virtue of that traditional perspective, my trajectory is wholly unremarkable and quite predictable. Young people don't "get it" because they don't know anything, and once they learn something (if not everything), they see the light. It raises a question that's on the tip of most everyone's tongues these days when the pop and classical worlds collide: is this process an inherently positive, predictable, and universal one by which each and everyone of us can become an astute, structure-oriented listener and musician simply by trying, or does it represent the artificial domestication of the listener, their mere social initiation into a rarefied world of musical elitism where other perspectives are unduly dismissed as too unsophisticated?

I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that as I gain experience, structure comes to matter more. I'm more aware of it when I listen, and I agonize over it more when I write. In all but the most extreme cases, it's not enough to turn me off entirely from a piece of music that I have only good reactions to otherwise, but I wonder if the current trajectory, assuming it continues, doesn't dictate that sooner or later that will change? That thought scares me a bit, though there's nothing I can do about it. Clinging to previously held beliefs simply to avoid admitting you were wrong is always a bad idea; labeling those who are willing to admit as much as "wishy-washy" also misses the point; and purposely remaining ignorant or cutting oneself off from the learning process when it becomes obvious that this process is changing your long-held beliefs is stooping quite low, dare I say it, in a pop sort of way. That's my philosophy with regard not only to the question of structure, but also of taste. If there's a time in my future when I will worship The Beatles, then so be it.

As a parting shot, check out this band from Vancouver:

Winning

A friend hipped me to them the other night, describing it as "Free Emo." That sounds about right. I could listen to this by myself in a quiet, dark room without getting bored, the same way I listen to Lutoslawski, Ives and Monk. But is it Pop?

...and what a pantheon it is

Someone named Clara at a place called Wikio has contacted me twice within the past couple of weeks to inform me that this blog has attained a ranking of 43rd in the classical music category. I can't figure out if the site offers any way to compare blogs in different categories, but I have to think that 43rd in classical music must be the equivalent of about 10,000th in "Entertainment" or "Politics." If they ever add a "Pan-Stylistic Musico-Philosophical Ramblings" category, I'm sure I'll jump right to the top of that, but I'm not holding my breath.

Though I continue to cling to it as if out of total ignorance, I'm fully aware that my quest to establish an egoless and altruistic blog persona is an overly idealistic proposition if there ever was one. Even so, I could not in good conscience accept the invitation to add a Wikio badge to the sidebar proclaiming my status. I'd much prefer that the reputation of this document be made or unmade by its content. I also think those things are just plain tacky, a tad bit too smug for my taste, and in the case of this particular category and ranking, not necessarily guaranteed to work to your advantage, kind of like advertising the fact that you're the 205,957th coolest person in the Twin Cities.

I suppose this means I'm no longer allowed to lament my small readership, complain about the paucity of comments, or wonder aloud how blogs which seem to me to have no clear identity or focus could be more popular than mine. I could do more to shove this blog in people's faces, but I just don't believe in doing that (and not in music, either). I certainly don't believe in leaving comments on other people's blogs simply to promote my own. That's not only self-serving but downright destructive. Obviously, it's not like I want to hide the blog from people, and I do wonder what the chances are of the random person who goes looking for something just like this actually finding it. You have to have more free time and patience than most anyone has in order to successfully navigate the blogosphere without a compass. In that way, I wonder if the rankings, the blogrolls, and the perfuctory back patting aren't worth something, if not just a little tiny bit. I still don't want the badge, though, and as best I can tell, I won't lose my ranking by turning it down.

It also occurred to me during this time that in a moment of vulnerability, I once tacked a "followers" list onto the sidebar. I'm thankful for the 8 of them, but using them for marketing purposes runs contrary to the M.O. around here, so away it goes. It's not entirely for the same reason that I'm seriously considering abandoning the Postroll as well. I still dig the concept, but I have not invested enough in it for it to work. As such, most of the posts listed were written or originally linked to by the same few bloggers. I envisioned it being a more diverse collection of posts from a wider variety of sources. Those sources, I'm sad to say, have largely failed to materialize, and while I still find time to investigate a few new blogs from time to time, I haven't stumbled on a new "favorite" music blogger for quite some time. If only I could simply hide it without straight up deleting it. I can't seem to figure out if there's a way to do that, which means there probably isn't. That way I could keep open the option of returning to it in the future without merely starting over.

That brings us to one more thing I could do if I really wanted to be a real blogger, and that would be to move to a real platform. The estimable Kris Tiner recently did just that (read his explanation here), with seriously bad ass results. Once again, though, I find myself espousing some lofty conceit of purity, thinking to myself instead that imposing generic templates renders templates moot and allows the document to succeed or fail based on its content rather than its slick packaging. That would work if everyone operated under those restrictions. More likely, though, I'm just shooting myself in the foot.

All I Had To Do Was Ask

Thanks for the comments y'all. Christmas came early today.

Comments

Getting a comment on something I've written here is like opening an unexpected birthday present, even if the comment is critical. Perhaps my readers are particularly shy, or perhaps my arguments are so earth-shattering and airtight as to preclude further discussion. Far more likely, though, is that no one is reading. I feel like some of the things I post here ought to rile people up a bit more than they do, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I sometimes stoop to that level as much to find out if anyone's actually reading as to get something off my chest.

Spam comments don't count, obviously. I get a good laugh out of some of them, and perhaps even a tiny bit of the same excitement I feel about the legitimate ones. That little bit of excitement has turned to quite a bit of impatience, however, as I've now received over 100 of them within the month. Though I published new posts at a similar rate the first time I ran the Blog Month experiment, I certainly didn't attract this kind of attention last year. Nonetheless, I can't believe it's a coincidence that behaving like a "real" Blogger has earned me an e-heckler. That person must be crapping their pants with delight that I'm taking the time to mention this here. Why not? It's Blog Month, goddammit.

Blogger makes it easy to deal with such things, and while I've previously expressed regret over the need to enable comment moderation, it's more apparent than ever that I have no choice. This whole thing makes me think of Kyle Gann. Though I come from a different planet, I'm an avid reader of his blog, so much so that I've taken it upon myself to start reading it from the beginning. It's brilliant and fascinating stuff the likes of which I wish there was more of of floating around on the musico-interweb, but I can only be disappointed at the fact that not only are new comments disabled in his archives, but old ones are not visible. If you've read Gann, you know that despite his brilliance and his espousal of a "generous" composing style, he has little patience with his readers and can be far from generous when dealing with them. Nothing could be less generous than hiding previous comments, where blogs with an actual readership tend to get really interesting.

Do comment threads get out of hand? Absolutely. Do I really want to read every comment ever made on PostClassic? Probably not. I'd be a month rather than a year into the archives if that were the case. Nonetheless, my bullshit detector is not too shabby, and as the Libertarians among us might point out, the internet in some cases polices itself pretty well. I'd rather make up my own mind if the comments were valid or not. Any lengthy comment thread is bound to suffer from an imbecile or two, but there are more than a few heavies among Gann's readership, and it's too bad the rest of us no longer have access to their off-the-cuff reactions to his often thought-provoking posts. At the very least, current posts still seem to allow comments, though I seem to recall that he once flirted with the idea of dispensing with those as well. Perhaps I'll never understand what a chore it is to administer a blog with that kind of traffic, but from where I sit today, it's tempting to say that if I found myself in that situation, I'd feel that I'd finally succeeded with this project, and that I had a responsibility to see it through. We'll see if I ever get there, and if I feel the same when I do.

Gann's quality is that much more impressive in light of his quantity. I've seldom been able to keep up with his posts, hence the idea of starting from the beginning. I'm finding that to be a much more informative and fulfilling way to approach my favorite blogs, even though it goes against the very core principle of blogging. I've wasted enough time sifting through people's soup recipes and vacation photos in search of their one music-related post of the year. At this point, I'm content to focus on a few writers' entire body of work and miss out on the day-to-day rat race of link dumping and live blogging. I still find time for it occasionally though, and you can bet your ass I'll be leaving comments if I read something that I feel warrants it. I just hope those comments survive as long as the original post.

Pop State of Mind

I have a student, an unusually talented student in fact, who's involved in equal parts classical and pop. We got into a conversation recently about the difference between the two worlds. I told her the things I've observed about pop musicians over the years, most of which are negative, and asked her if any of that resonated with her experience.

Not only did it resonate, in fact, but she told me something that trumps all of my curmudgeonly bellyaching on the subject. She said that her pop music friends make fun of her for having a teacher, because the only people who have to take lessons are people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, we continued talking and I realized that this bothered me a lot more than it bothered her. She's both unusually mature and profoundly gifted, and so the sheer absurdity of such a statement is as obvious to her as it is to me. Needless to say, though, that this experience did nothing to ingratiate me to the pop music world that many of my peers seem to view as the savior of "serious" music.

I have more firsthand experience with classical music and jazz, and certainly those worlds are no strangers to a variety of equally specious assumptions and social ills, though they couldn't be more different in nature. Even so, the militant ignorance of pop musicians has always struck me as a high crime among misdemeanors. If I found the results compelling, I would feel differently.

Surveying The Landscape For The Third Time

The Adam Mickiewicz Institute's culture.pl website has a nice biography of Lutoslawski. The final paragraph is an excellent jumping off point for something I've wanted to write about for the last week or so:

Despite all the differences between the works from the various periods of his career, and the fact that he was constantly developing his musical language, Witold Lutoslawski remains in our times a rare example of a composer who has a distinctly defined, very individual style in his compositions. He never belonged to any "school" of composition, he did not succumb to trends and fashions, did not uphold traditions and did not participate in any avantgarde revolutions. He was however both avantgarde, and traditional. Among the aesthetic crossroads of the second half of the twentieth century, he found his own path that he pursued with determination, led by his unfailing artistic sense. His music is a model of the ideal balance between form and content, intellect and emotion. His perfection has secured for Lutoslawski a permanent place among the greatest composers of the twentieth century.

Nationalistic cheerleading aside, if there's any truth at all to this paragraph, then everything suddenly makes perfect sense. Lutoslawski didn't have a "thing," a calling card, a zinger, and therefore he toils in relative obscurity in comparison to Messiaen and his Catholocism, Coltrane and his black nationalism, and so on and so forth. Without a "useful term of abuse" with which to describe his work, it merely falls through the cracks.

This leads us back to the earlier discussion of the internet and the trends I said I perceive emerging from it. For what it's worth, I can't envision myself as an exponent of any of them, whether that be the burgeoning ones or the sputtering ones, the populist ones or the ivory tower ones, uptown or downtown, tonal or atonal. I've previously written about this (rather concisely) here. It seems awfully clear that the blogs and websites which capture the most attention, the most traffic, the most comments, and the most links without exception have a "thing." I occasionally even get e-mails from site ranking companies informing me that my blog has attained this or that rank in the category of "Classical Music Blogs" despite the fact that the content here is disproportionately skewed towards jazz and philosophy rather than classical music. In one case, it was painfully obvious that the reviewer had read only the blog heading and none of the content. It's hardly a revelation to me at this point that stylistic boxes rule the day, yet that doesn't make it any easier to figure out where (or if) I fit into the landscape, nor to forgive fragmented minds their clumsiness.

Actually, I wouldn't necessarily think to label Lutoslawski's music beyond category. The later works are clearly "atonal" as opposed to tonal, and in the figurative sense, "uptown" as opposed to "downtown." You can make those terms fit, but they also invoke connotations that aren't close to relevant. The SPCO recently featured his music on a concert entitled "Echoes of Eastern Europe," and indeed, the other pieces on the program (by Ligeti and Kurtag) fit like a stylistic glove (for the record, this was also one of the 3 best concerts I've ever been to in my life). It made sense as a label, and as a mere geographic truth as opposed to a stylistic box, it was rather innocuous. Problem is it's not nearly as hip as "postminimalism" or "radical music." Those are calling cards while Eastern Europe is, well, Eastern Europe. It belongs to too many people and appeals to too few to be co-opted by a New Music clique. "Yeah, I'm really into Eastern European pan-sympho-toric sound art." Not going to happen.

Of course, it is just as fashionable to make one's self out to be above categorization as it is to acquire or invent your own hipper-than-thou category. My problem is not that I abhor or defy labels (I don't), and even less that I tend to meld styles in my work (I sometimes do, but not often), but that I'm inclined to work concurrently in a few clearly disparate styles at once. Perhaps that's a sign of creative immaturity, or just a "restless mind." For what its worth, I do identify marginally with several well-established styles, but none of them are cool right now, and some of them are decidedly uncool, most especially among practitioners of the other styles. That's what's really tough: working concurrently with groups of people who abhor each other's work. Whoever called music "the social art" should have called it "the art of socializing." But you knew that.

*+1*

I just found Lutoslawski's fan page on Facebook and joined up. Seeing that some downright obscure musicians flash across my screen virtually every time I log in, I had begun to wonder if he had one at all. It's a relief, but a small one. I was merely the 323rd person to become a fan. In contrast, Messiaen, a composer who one might place in the same general epoch as Lutoslawski if not precisely in the same style, has over 5,000 fans. Ligeti has over 7,000, Wayne Shorter has over 8,000, and Monk over 20,000. While I'm fans of these musicians as well (and not just on Facebook), it's a head-scratcher nonetheless. Vote Witold!

Sharing

One thing I plan to do more of on this blog as time goes on is share recordings and scores of my compositions. It seems to be de rigeur on blogs such as this one, whether that's because bloggers think people need to be entertained to remain engaged, or whether they think it legitimizes them as commentators to be able to demonstrate that they can do more than merely blow smoke. I have a few things "in the can" so to speak at this very moment, but I'm holding on to them until Blog Month in concluded. They're things that I want people to notice, which means that burying them in the middle of this uncharacteristic flurry of activity isn't the smartest thing to do.

I remember how exciting it was when advances in technology converged with advances in my own financial capabilities to the point where I was able to purchase a serviceable computer and some high end notation software for the first time. I stumbled on sibeliusmusic.com (then called something else), which was at that time brand spankin' new, and silly as it sounds to say it now, it was one of the most exciting times I've had as a composer. Because the site (and the very concept, I think) were so new, there were very few users, and yet, those who did use it knew what they'd stumbled on. That small community of strangers thoughtfully listened to and reviewed each other's works in a way that seldom happens in person, and it was tremendously exciting to see what people came up with next, as well as to post your latest opus and see if anyone liked it. What made all of this possible was that the total quantity of material on the site was of an eminently manageable size, and while one could certainly argue that the value in that was limited because the diversity of perspectives was limited, the truth is that in short order, the quantity became unmanageable, the community fell apart, no one knew which way was up, and pretty soon, I came to miss the days when the world seemed smaller. It simply became impossible to keep up with everything that went up on that site, which I now realize, of course, was just a microcosm for the entire internet in that same regard. I still have my page, but I haven't sold a score or had a review in several years, nor have I done either of those things for another user for the same length of time.

I also remember how anguished my mom was at the time (I was 18 and still living at home). She was convinced that someone was going to steal my compositions and take credit for them. I tried to tell her that it was not worth doing that because there was nothing to be accomplished in the way of selling them or using them to promote oneself, since I was already doing those things and failing miserably. That did not alleviate her worries, for whatever reason. To this day, I'm not aware of anyone plagiarizing any of the work that I've made available on the internet, nor have I read any stories about this happening to others. Many many musicians, composers and performers alike, make work available for free through a variety of outlets, and the prevailing wisdom seems to be that this is not only safe, but downright necessary in the current climate. Sure, I'd like to catch a career break somewhere along the line, but my primary reason for putting things out there in this way is simply to see if anyone cares to notice, and hopefully to reach someone (even just one person) who gets a kick out of the music. Considering the amount of smoke blown 'round these parts, it also can't hurt to remind readers that I'm a musician, too, not just an idle observer.

Detour

Today's entry is hidden among the archives in the form of a response to a comment I received on the post that I consider to by the magnum opus of this blog so far. The comment itself became so magnum, in fact, that Blogger wouldn't accept it, so I broke it into 4 parts. Upon further examination, I realized that it was somehow perceiving HTML somewhere in the text, and that the length limit it was imposing was specifically on the HTML, not on the comment itself. That's a relief, because I seem to recall posting a few epic comments both here and elsewhere over the years, and have never had a problem. I thought maybe things had changed, but more likely, it was just a one-time glitch.

The Original Post

The Comments Thread

Surveying The Landscape Again

I'm not ashamed to admit that part of what gets me so worked up about the blogospheric trendiness I referred to in the previous post is the utter certainty on the part of the writer that by merely describing their relationship with an artist's work, they're somehow doing the rest of us this huge favor by shaking us out of our ivory tower complacency. Well, since it's Blog Month here at My Fickle Ears Dig, why not take a break from all the bellyaching I do the other 11 (and a half, it seems) months out of the year to advocate rather than castigate?

I really wish I saw Lutoslawski's name on my computer screen more often. In fact, I'm not sure this is even the first time I've said that here, but if it is, I've certainly been thinking it for some time now because it seems like I say it to myself all the time. Lutoslawski is quickly becoming one my of absolute favorite composers, and in fact threatens to be the first composer I'd ever feel comfortable naming as my one favorite composer. As I remarked earlier this month, naming favorites is a tenuous proposition when it comes to composers because few of them are consistent, and hence, most anyone's favorite composer undoubtedly wrote a lot of music that person wouldn't want to have to listen to, or at least not very often. Even so, I'm so consistently enraptured by Lutoslawski's music as to consider going that far.

What prevents me from going there right this minute is that my depth of experience is not yet great enough to warrant it. There could be a bunch of turds lurking around the corner that by sheer happenstance have somehow managed to elude me, though I doubt it. I was first introduced to Lutoslawski's music by attending concerts by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, who often programs his music. Later, I started a Pandora station, "Witold Lutoslawski Radio." I primarily use Pandora to investigate pop-oriented music that I'm merely curious about but don't want to pay for, and not usually so much for the jazz and classical idioms that I'm more committed to and perfectly willing to pay for. However, I thought it would be appropriate and funny to have at least one station centered around a thorny new-music type of artist, and Lutoslawski's name was just long enough to make it perfect for the task.

Holy shit was I in for an awakening. Though I'm hard-pressed to name specific pieces (Pandora doesn't allow specific requests; you can "bookmark" songs that pop up simply to remember what they're called, but I neglected to do that), the station seemed to be feeding me mostly pieces for solo string instruments and orchestra, probably because "a prominent cello" is a defining characteristic in their system and once I clicked thumbs up on a cello concerto, that was that. Not that I'm complaining, though; I myself have come to enjoy writing concertos more than simply writing for large ensembles because I feel like having a clear soloist forces me into writing melodies in a way that I've never been inclined to otherwise, or at least thinking more melodically rather than just texturally. This has sparked an interest in various different kinds of pieces for soloist and orchestra, and Lutoslawski's music is a good an argument as any for the continued vitality and viability of the concerto format (he rarely seems to use the word "concerto," so I guess I'm using it more out of convenience).

Most recently, through the miracle of iTunes, I purchased in digital format a 2 disc set of Lutoslawski's orchestral works for less than what a single disc fetches in the physical realm these days. I'm not yet done working through it and am already blown away. The opening track is called "Symphonic Variations for Orchestra." It was the first thing I listened to, and was not what I expected. It is very much a "crowd pleaser," or something like that, a raucous, very accessible concert-opening type of work that one would think could find its way onto programs anywhere and everywhere. Mind you that I forfeited my right to authoritatively label a piece as "accessible" in the abstract sometime around the time I was 17, when my full kookiness began to become apparent, but that fact notwithstanding, I would hope that there's a bright future for pieces like this one, which seems to me to be one of those exceedingly rare pieces that has something for everyone without stooping to the level of mere orchestrational parlor tricks. I wonder if anyone ever plays it?

The "Mi-Parti" is very different, very much what I was expecting out of this set, and a perfect example of what, to me, makes Lutoslawski's music so special. This piece is as modern sounding as anything else, totally "out" in the parlance of the jazz community, and it knocked me out of my chair the very first time I heard it. In fact, that's been the case with the vast majority of Lutoslawski's pieces that I've heard. Even for this avowed new-music kook, that's quite unusual. I can't think of an initial experience I've had with another composer's music that's even close to comparable. Elliott Carter's "Variations for Orchestra" and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony are two other favorite pieces of mine which I'd locate roughly in the same stylistic ballpark as Lutoslawski, yet I remember vividly that both of them left me rather underwhelmed on first hearing. In fact, the Shostakovich had no impact on me whatsoever, and frankly, being about halfway through his complete symphonies at the moment, that's about as much impact as any of them ever have the first time, or even subsequently. The 4th was different, for whatever reason; hearing it for the second time was probably the most purely flabbergasted I've ever been while listening to music, not only due to the weight of suddenly "getting it" all at once, but from recalling what bits and pieces I remembered clearly from the first hearing and simply wondering how it could be so different the next time.

Something about Lutoslawski is different, and I couldn't possibly try to explain what it is at this point because I don't know. I'd be happy to go on not knowing if the whole thing didn't make me so damn curious. Of course, it's external factors that are responsible for that curiosity, namely the odious bickering over the very validity of atonal music and the specious overgeneralizations about the people who write it, play it and listen to it. Exhibit A amongst those overgeneralizations is the idea that the music cannot be accessible, that it can fruitfully only be studied, not heard, and that it cannot make a positive impression on first hearing. I'm just one person, but those observations simply do not resonate with me, and they never did, even back when my naivete entitled me to quite a bit more authority as a "regular audience member" than I have now that I've been to music school and tried to make a career of it. While in past years I may have searched momentarily for an example, I now have one at the immediate ready. Lutoslawski's music, as atonal and modernist as it gets, is some of the most accessible music I've ever heard. I'm wondering if no one else agrees with me, or if it's just that none of them have a blog.

Surveying The Landscape

The more time I invest in my blogospheric activities, the clearer it becomes to me that I must be the most uncool blogger in the world. I've been scouring the landscape for new and interesting writers for quite a while now, long enough that I'm beginning to perceive trends that I didn't notice before, and although most all of these trends lay bare my extreme uncoolness, the fact that I'm aware of them is a very good thing, for one of my primary purposes in bothering to read music blogs has been to try to get an idea of what's going on everywhere else in the world. I suppose it's possible that the internet, which as we all know is currently ruining society, has merely given me a bunch of false impressions of what and how people think outside of Minneapolis. I find it doubtful, however, that this is entirely the case.

So, in case you don't know, let me tell you what's cool right now. First of all, everyone who you'd never expect seems to have decided that pop music is great, maybe even our only hope. Within that group, it seems to me that there's a rather strong contingent of minimalist and post-minimalists (whatever the hell that is), though the overlap is not strict. While both classical and jazz musicians seem to be looking increasingly to pop music and minimalism for inspiration, the jazz people also seem to be disproportionately adamant about the hybridized jazz-rock and free-jazz music of the 1970's and 80's that the bebop establishment so loathes.

Now, if you're relatively new to everything, don't go generalizing based on that last paragraph. It's just my highly subjective impression of where online musical discourse seems to me to differ most notably from the tiny little world I live in. And if you're older and wiser than I am, don't just dismiss this as some random idiot from fly-over country blowing smoke about people and places he knows nothing about aside from what comes across his computer screen. This is what blogs do, and, at least during Blog Month, this one is no exception. I suspect it would be an overreaction to label these as large-scale trends in the music world, and I also suspect that the reason the internet seems to be teeming with activity in some areas and utterly devoid of it in others is almost entirely attributable to the demographics of who tends to embrace the internet as a tool and who has resisted. If the musico-blogosphere was just a bit older and more (musically) conservative than it is, it would probably better represent the world at large. That is doesn't is nothing to lose sleep over, but it does get those of us who don't fit the mold comfortably thinking about where (or if) we fit into anything in particular.

While I'm under 30, embrace the blog format, use computers many hours a day, and believe that the internet is generally a good thing, I'm also not a minimalist, not a fusion guy, and I absolutely can't stand pop music. As I've become more aware of the trends I mentioned, I've made a certain amount of effort to sample the music that everyone makes such big deal about on their blogs. They make it sound so cool that the letdown when I heard it was pretty severe. The saying goes that the more you know, the more you don't know, and this being the dynamic at work here, I quickly began to feel obligated to educate myself about things that everyone seemed to have in common but me. What I found, though, was that even though I knew few of the artists names, the sounds were in large part not new to me, for whatever reason. Trends being what they were, I assumed that I hadn't embraced them simply because I hadn't heard them, when in fact I knew more than I thought I did.

What I'm getting at here is that there's knowledge for knowledge's sake, and then there's knowledge that is useful or essential to one's very existence. There's plenty that I am interested in, plenty that I know I don't know about things I've already found to be very important to me. Stumbling on this whole other world made me not only feel guilty, but more importantly, made me wonder if perhaps I had missed the boat out of ignorance, and that being both a tragic and embarrassing condition to be in, it seemed necessary to rectify things. I wouldn't want to overstate how much listening I've done; it hasn't been all that much, but it's been enough for me to say that by this time, I would have expected to have found something that really grabbed me if that something exists at all. By the time I had listened to this much Miles Davis Quintet, this much Aaron Jay Kernis, this much Gentle Giant, I was hooked. I'm still waiting for that to happen with the music about which the blogosphere is constantly abuzz, but I'm running out of time to wait, and increasingly wondering if it's worth the wait at all. I think it would have happened by now if it's ever going to.

Piano Proficiency (iv)

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

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

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

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

Piano Proficiency (iii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing To Say

So,...yeah. The title says it all. Even taking into account my bout with the flu, I'm a bit shocked at how utterly devoid of blog-worthy topics my brain has been for the past several days, even under the expanded definition of "blog-worthy" which I've decided to allow myself this month. With that in mind, here's some public soul-searching of the type I'm generally not inclined to share.

A couple of weeks ago, another musician who I had not known for very long asked me what my "endgame" is. I could not answer the question coherently. In many ways, I think I'm getting worse at answering that question as time goes on. My definition of success has become more about the quality of my work than about where, when, with whom, and for how much $$$ I get to make it. Perhaps what I'm missing is the connection between those two things, the realization that the circumstances surrounding the creation of a work impact one's success in making it. Then again, comfort and contentedness seem to do nothing for artists but make them lazy, ultimately harming the quality of their work, not helping it. So without necessarily turning against career success in principle, I'm quite content to be guided by a more abstract concept of success rooted in the perceived quality of what I've made rather than my general quality of life at the time. It's hard to fit that into a one sentence answer, so I'll probably continue to trip all over myself when people ask me, but it's the answer nonetheless.

booyah

Apparently, when you save a draft on Blogger and publish it later, it appears under the date of the draft, not the date you clicked "publish." Had I known this, I could have compensated for my flu-induced failures by merely saving a few nonsense words as a draft on each day I missed, then returning to them later when I felt well enough to write coherently again. Oh well. The important thing to note is that the second entry in the "Piano Proficiency" series, my angst-ridden account of unconsummated desire for a forbidden instrument, has just now been completed, but appears under the heading of 3 November. The date of 4 November, meanwhile, remains truly unconsummated.

A Cry For Attention?

It was a sad day when I realized I had no choice but to enable comment moderation on this blog. Even though I trust myself to be an evenhanded moderator and have never rejected a critical comment here (hell, I'd be happy to receive one at this point), the idea of unmoderated comment threads is certainly more appealing in the abstract.

The comment moderation feature did its job, slowing the influx of spam comments from a moderate trickle to a nearly non-existent one, and this has been the case for some time now. I doubt it's a coincidence, then, that after posting thrice in a span of five days (an unheard of rate of productivity 'round these parts), I've now had to reject two spam comments within the last 24 hours, this after having scarcely encountered a single one for quite a long stretch where I was lucky to post three times a month.

All the more reason why this will remain a once-a-year deal.

This Project is Cursed

It figures that a mere 2 days into Blog Month 2009, I would come down with a raging case of the flu. Even an action as small as typing felt like running a marathon at the height of it, and hence, I've already fallen short of my goal for this year's project. There's always next year...

I've always displayed a very peculiar synthesis of my parents' personalities when it comes to getting work done, often putting things off for weeks at a time and missing deadlines only to suddenly get possessed by some random shot of adrenaline at the worst possible time and nearly pull an all-nighter completing some project that has no immediate timetable. In the end, it usually works out ok for my career aspirations, but almost never for my health, and this latest episode being in part a result of that phenomenon, I'm again pondering why exactly it is that I can't fall asleep between the hours of 8pm and 2am, no matter how tired I am. It certainly would make things a whole lot easier.

Piano Proficiency (ii)

I've never been one for favorites, top-ten lists, and the like. As a kid I refused to identify a "best friend," maintaining that all my friends were important to me. These days, I refuse to name favorite composers on the grounds that no composer's output taken collectively could qualify. I think it's infinitely more helpful to name favorite pieces individually, as this paints a much clearer picture (the Postroll exemplifies the same approach taken to bloggers). The favorite instrument question is similarly flawed, and yet, there's been little doubt in my mind for several years that the piano is my favorite instrument. Perhaps a better way to put it is that much of my favorite music is written for the piano, and also that I enjoy writing for the piano myself quite thoroughly. If only I had learned to play it.

I do like the sound of the tuba, and even enjoy playing it from time to time, yet within the last several years, I suddenly haven't been able to shake the feeling that there's more to life, a feeling I wasn't burdened with before, and which afforded me the focus needed to develop my technique quite well, yet which now has made it all but impossible to find the discipline necessary to continue to advance technically on the instrument. Concurrently, whereby the hardest thing about sitting down to play piano has always been the sudden feeling of being handicapped in comparison to the instrument I had invested so much more time in learning, the attraction of more immediate technical advancement per unit of practice on an instrument where I have less experience has become seductive, even if the endgame is inevitably the same.

What's new here is my willingness to oblige this temptation, not its presence. I've always been inclined to pick up new instruments, starting after only a year of playing euphonium in band when I begged my mom to buy me a trumpet, and going through high school, where I often showed up to pep band events with a sousaphone, euphonium, and trumpet in hand, and where I once took a clarinet out of the band room behind the teacher's back and got reasonably competent at it within a couple of weeks in just a few minutes a day at home. I received what I considered to be good advice from many people along the way about the prospect of being a multi-instrumentalist, advice which invariably parroted the "jack of all trades, master of none" zinger. Eventually, I heard it enough that I came to believe it, and in fact, it's undoubtedly for the better that I've at least been as far as I have down the path of specialization, for should I decide to veer off of it, I'm eminently better equipped to do so. Nonetheless, it's hard not to wonder if that impulse couldn't have been turned into something the way my somewhat less acute impulse to rescue the reputation of the tuba has been turned into, well...something else.

While it appeared for some time following my sudden adolescent musical conversion from uncooperative pupil to star student that the tuba was the destination, it's looking more and more like merely part of the journey these days. I'm finding my interests too diverse and my patience too short to continue doing what has to be done to develop my tuba playing to its fullest potential. I feel dirty just writing that, but it's true: I could not see the path to tuba virtuosity more clearly and could not abhor it more thoroughly than I do. That's not because it's not worth it, or because I wouldn't love to have it, but simply because my tolerance for the menial technical work like lip slurs, long tones, and articulation drills which got me ahead of the game in college has been burned to shreds, my resolve to give it another go crushed by too many "square one" moments that I don't feel I've earned, but which the combination of my physique and mental approach have yielded over and over against every effort to the contrary.

I don't expect my piano playing to catch up to my tuba playing anytime soon, and I'm certainly not giving up on the tuba altogether. I've just realized, like many "professionals," that I need a way to make playing tuba fun again. I've also waited way too long to make playing piano fun for the first time.

Piano Proficiency (i)

I have a complicated relationship with the piano. It should be more complicated, actually, since that's usually what happens when you invest a lot in a relationship; my investment, though, has been made inconsistently, in spates, and in that scattered, dabbling way that yields smaller and more trivial rewards than it would had all that work been more focused and occurred over a shorter period of time.

There were two harpsichords and zero pianos in the household I was raised in. Some of my earliest memories are of jumping on the couch while my dad played the music of Bach, Rameau, and Scarlatti. I called it "Bouncing Music," much to the chagrin of my mother, who had the best interests of the couch in mind. She told me that someday, I would bring my girlfriend over to sit on that couch, and that I wouldn't want it to be saggy and uneven. Predictably, that admonishment had no effect on a 5 year-old.

I came downstairs one day on my birthday and found a handwritten version of "Happy Birthday" waiting for me on the stand of one of the harpsichords. It was my mother's last best effort to get me interested in playing music, but was, like all previous efforts to that end, quite unsuccessful. I think about that day a lot, sometimes every day for stretches of weeks as I now ponder my musical strengths and weaknesses and how they might be different had I not been so decisively scornful of music until I reached junior high school.

Around the time I turned 12, a friend and I took it upon ourselves to investigate a moving sale taking place just up the block, and stumbled on a more-than-serviceable upright piano on sale for $200. It cost $250 to move it down the block, but my parents knew what they had (even if the seller didn't), and so they took the plunge. I was thusly introduced to the piano music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven through my dad's suddenly incessant practice (a neighbor called us on the phone and asked us to stop playing the record we'd been listening to all day, since it was getting late). Because this was around the time I had started playing in the school band (which I only did because we had to join either band or choir, and I was not going to sing), I started to dabble with the various keyboard instruments that now dominated our house, developing what I would later come to understand was a very strong understanding of basic music theory concepts, yet without so much as a hint of proper keyboard technique.

While I've learned quite a bit over the years, and even had to pass a piano test in college, my relationship with the instrument has hardly changed since this early stage. I never invested the least bit of time in developing any real technique, most especially in the area of independence of the two hands. My college piano class for music majors was all about applying theory to the keyboard, not about actually playing the instrument, and I was able to skate by putting forth minimal effort since this was, in fact, the only piano-based skill I already had at that time.

I sat down no fewer than 5 separate times in college and told myself that this was the time when I would get serious about playing piano. It never lasted more than several days, save for one isolated incident where I practiced the first Two-Part Invention religiously for 6 weeks, finally giving up having not once gotten through it at even a moderate tempo without making at least one basic technical mistake. After a while, when the impulse struck me to give the instrument another shot, I simply thought back to all of the previous attempts and how they ended (not well), and simply abandoned the idea. That's where I've been for the past 5 years or so.

The reason I'm taking to time to relate all of this is that, through a combination of many factors, I have as of a few weeks ago finally found whatever it is I needed to find in myself to get serious about the piano for the first time. I plan on sharing more about what exactly these factors have been in the very near future.

October November Is Blog Month

October November is Blog Month here at My Fickle Ears Dig It. Continuing a tradition that was initiated last year, I will take a brief hiatus from spewing venom about arcane musical preoccupations and instead allow myself the freedom to behave like a "real" blogger. While the content will remain centered around music, I reserve the right to digress into virtually any topic, including (especially) those I know next to nothing about, as well as the barely-Twitter-worthy details of everyday life that people seem to think their friends actually care about. I'll also be using jargon and acronyms liberally, doing away with proofreading, and (mark my words) posting at least one picture. Oh, the humanity...

Last year's half-successful experiment took place in October, a tradition I had hoped to continue this year. October is easily my favorite month, boasting my favorite weather (typically the ONLY good weather we get all year in MN), favorite holiday (Halloween), and to top it off, my birthday. Nonetheless, seeing that I was on tour through the first week of the month*, and also that I managed to straight up forget to blog a number of times last year during which time I had nothing on the order of a tour to distract me, I figured it was prudent to put it off a bit.

I hedged my bets last year and merely aspired to average a post a day. Seeing that I failed to meet that goal, it makes no sense to up the ante this time around. However, given that the point of a "real" blog is to engage in self-centered excess, I hereby aspire to actually post at least once on each calendar day this month, and also to exceed 31 posts for the month (i.e. post twice in a day at least once...which is different from posting once in a day at least twice; think about THAT). Click here to read last year's Blog Month Intro, which captures the raw excitement of the initial experiment in a way which I'm hard-pressed to recreate today.


*I celebrated my birthday in Williston, ND this year with a cake baked for me by total strangers that read "Happy Birthday Tuba Man." Now that's living!

Hidden Tracks (ii)

As long-time MFEDI readers know, I've been fixated for some time on the question of the inherent value of art considered apart from it's content. This comes as a direct consequence of the frequency with which I encounter people, institutions, theories, philosophies and public policies alike that take art to be an inherently positive thing simply by virtue of its being art. The most obvious flaw in this idea is that we, collectively, cannot seem to agree on what is and is not art in the first place, and hence, a rational debate is impossible because we cannot agree on a definition of our terms. But what if we could define our terms, proceeded to have the debate, and reached the conclusion that all art is, in fact, wholesome, constructive, and valuable (i.e. the way many seem to have concluded anyway, but which I personally disagree with)? Where would that leave us?

More recently, what fascinates me about this idea is the matter of supply and demand. How much of a good thing can we have before that good thing becomes a mediocre thing, or even a bad thing? Is there anything about art that would lead us to expect it to be immune to this mechanism (other than the fact that because we can't define what it is, we can't really know the answer)?

Supply and demand is an economic principle, but there are parallels to this idea in every conceivable facet of life. There's the physical aspect of it, seen in the principle of diffusion; the geographical/migratory aspect of it, seen in people going where the jobs are, where the resources are, or simply trying to get farther and farther from each other (i.e. suburban sprawl); the biological aspect of it, where practically any element in its purest form is toxic to living things, where we know it is possible to die from drinking too much of the substance most essential to survival (water), and where overpopulation ultimately leads to near extinction.

I lack the formal Philosophical grounding to know if there's an established global term for this idea outside the realm of economics, but one can clearly see that it is everywhere, both in nature and in society. It is not only possible to have too much of a good thing, it is virtually always the case that having too much of a good thing is 100 times worse than having just barely enough, and only marginally better than having none at all. Hence, even if we cannot define art, it would be silly to believe that its case would any different. And so I worry about it. A lot.

Art is everywhere. There's more music available for free online than a person could listen to in a thousand lifetimes. It would be a chore to find a vacant storefront in a bad neighborhood to fix up and turn into an art space because most all of them have already been bought up and turned into art spaces. And then there's the relatively recent idea of finding beauty in everyday objects or sounds (i.e. from Cage, et al), something which I embrace wholeheartedly, sometimes against the complaints of acquaintances and colleagues, but which also scares the living crap out of me as an artist because it would seem to render my work irrelevant, even to myself.

Digging even further, there's the "music is for everybody" issue. There's scarcely a saying I feel more conflicted about than that, since, while I (and everyone else) would just love to believe it solely for it's power to validate what we do, we all know it's not true. Speaking in absolutes is a death wish in rational debate, and this saying manages to do it not once but twice, first with "music" (i.e. ALL music? Music generally? What?) and, more obviously, with "everybody." More relevant to the present discussion, though, is that us musicians are literally putting ourselves out of business with this phrase. This is a brutal irony considering that it is most often trotted out as a marketing tool aimed at getting more kids involved in music, and hence yielding more income both for the music teachers who teach them and for the performers whose concerts it is assumed they will then attend for the rest of their lives. I've bellyached before about the soulless cynicism inherent in that thinking, so I'll leave that issue alone for now. The point is that in aiming to create more and more of a good thing, we inevitably create too much of it, and that it's equally inevitable that this will leave us worse off in the long run than we were before.

Some would (and do) argue that we're not creating the same good thing here, since the vast majority of these students don't become professional musicians, and hence don't offer a competing product (i.e. "professional level" performances). In a world with any justice whatsoever, that would indeed be the case, but we do not live in such a world, for in practice, audiences don't choose "professional level" performances over less-than competent performances; they're more interested in their friends' bands than anyone else's band simply because it's their friends, and they largely can't tell the difference in musicianship anyway where there is one. The retort to that is that more music education creates more astute listeners who can tell the difference. Perhaps, but it also creates more friends who continue to perform at a less-than-professional level as adults, creating a product that friendless professional musicians simply can't compete with, no matter how good they are. Further, it is demonstrable that more and more of these students are pursuing professional careers insofar as that entails majoring in music in college. That's the crown jewel of the "music is for everybody" battlecry, and one which is responsible above all else for its exceptional power to induce the opposite of its intended outcome.

Why the extreme cynicism? Because if there's one thing I wasn't prepared for when i left school, it was what audiences everywhere do and don't notice about musical performances. We've all had the experience of playing a less-than-stellar show and subsequently receiving a warm compliment from an oblivious audience member who couldn't tell the difference. That's not really what I'm talking about, though. I'm thinking more of identity: age, gender, dress, manner, politics and social group all seem to have more to do with success than musicianship does. I won't even tack on the seemingly obligatory "...these days" to that last statement, since "these days" are the only ones I know. Who can say if it's ever been any different? I do have a theory, though, which is that the age of musical plenty we live in has made this even worse than it could possibly have been before. Indeed, it would mark a rather momentous break with countless observable phenomena in nature and human society alike if this were not the case.

It's fun (and very blogospheric of me, I must admit) to list off economic, geographic and biological principles as if I know something about them, whereas in truth, I have only a cursory understanding of each phenomenon I listed. Nonetheless, allow me to attempt to spin this cursory understanding into a halfway compelling recommendation for the way forward. As I understand it, the word "sustainability" is on the tips of a lot of people's tongues these days. This is because we're slowly realizing that economic growth is not mediated solely by our desire to make it happen, but by factors beyond our direct control, like the non-renewability of certain natural resources, or the impossibility of technology replacing more workers than there are left to replace. Hence, instead of continued economic growth benefitting everyone, we are finding that the costs of maintaining a certain rate of growth are so severe as to defeat its utilitarian purpose.

It's more than a stretch to lump modern-day arts advocacy in with fascistic global capitalism, but I don't think it's debatable to say that growth-for-growth's-sake describes the philosophy of one as well as the other, or that there's a tipping point right around the corner in both cases. As we know, too much of something portends that thing's imminent starvation or diffusion or migration or explosion. So-called sustainability isn't so much about surviving that endgame as it is about achieving a kind of equilibrium that prevents the situation from ever getting quite so dire in the first place. So what does sustainability mean in the economics of art? A good start would be to abandon citing extrinsic benefits as the primary method of establishing art's value in the public arena. Nothing could be less sustainable than that smoke and mirrors act. A related action would be to embrace the idea of exposure over that of proselytizing, or in other words, to present music one believes strongly in to new audiences without a hint of superiority or moralization. This ensures a sustainable (if small) influx of new listeners who haven't merely been fooled or seduced into showing up. And last, of course, is to abandon the conceit of music being for everyone.

How could I write such a thing? Besides knowing it not to be true, the idea terrifies me, and not because I'm some elitist snob who'd rather be poor and unknown if it means getting the better of my aesthetic enemies. Sign me up for fame and fortune yesterday, but I'm afraid that what's keeping me from getting there isn't a lack of a musical awareness in the world at large, but rather a heaping, volatile, unsustainable pile of it that just keeps on growing, rendering my contribution to it more meaningless by the hour.

Hidden Tracks (i)

I often think about how the relative fortunes and career trajectories of musicians of different generations are affected by technology, and when I say this, I'm thinking purely in terms of their paths to "success," whether defined by themselves or someone else. Obviously, technology affects what we create, not just our success or failure in being recognized for it, and that's certainly a fertile area for discussion, but it's also worth pondering whether or not a musician is in the right place at the right time relative to technology, and how that affects, for lack of a better term, their business decisions.

I was born in 1982, started playing music around 1993, and consider myself to have gotten "serious" sometime in 1999. It's often difficult for me to distinguish what has actually changed since then from what I was simply ignorant of, but to my recollection, while record labels still meant something, everybody and their brother was already recording, producing and distributing their own discs back then, and it was obvious that sooner or later, having a CD out would cease to mean anything at all. When exactly that threshold was reached is probably impossible to determine; it probably happened at different times in different places, and may, in truth, have already happened most places by the time I even became aware of it. Suffice it to say, then, that I've always felt just a bit screwed over.

Whether or not that's justified is another story, for I've benefitted in innumerable ways (most importantly as a listener, I think) from the increased accessibility (lower case "a") of recorded music. It's no coincidence that my getting "serious" about music happened exactly when I started spending substantial portions of my time listening to music, but the cruelty of that scenario is that I was allowed to become enraptured with a world that was already dead and gone. Even though I've tried many times to accept that fact and move on, part of me will never forget the feeling of staring at the paltry stack of discs that comprised my collection circa 1999 and looking forward to the day when I could offer the world such a document of my own. Every one of those discs mattered to me, so the idea of making one myself seemed significant. Little did I know it was already too late.

So, my relationship to technology is a bit like the milk commercial where the guy arrives in what appears to be heaven (for those who haven't seen it: besides angels, there are brownies and chocolate chip cookies everywhere, but when he opens the fridge, the milk carton is empty, and he's left wondering where he actually is). Such is life as a musician who came of age during digital distribution's pre-natal stage, seduced by music when physical media still mattered, but unable to move others beyond casual resignation using the same format.

Truthfully, I could have jumped on the train just in the nick of time had I so chosen. There certainly were people my age and younger in 1999 who had discs of their own, and although it may already have meant next to nothing in the "real world," it certainly seemed pretty cool to other young people who didn't know any better. The problem with me was that I did know better. I largely resented these kids, first of all because their rich uncle had obviously bankrolled the project, and second because, though I had quite a ways to go myself, I could hear that their playing (and writing, in some cases) was not worthy of releasing a document.

I didn't want to be like that, and so it was something of a point of pride for me for a long time that I didn't have a disc. I wanted one, but I wanted it to be good, and seeing so many kids my age coming out with junk that they'd obviously be embarrassed about within the decade made me think twice. I'm glad I did, because anything I could have mustered back then would most certainly have had to be pulled of the shelves (err...servers?) in short order. I was quite self-righteous about this choice for a long time; it was the only way to console myself for being left completely in the dust, especially after it became obvious that people were tiling their bathrooms with these things, and that I'd passed on my only fleeting chance to make one that mattered to anyone at all.

The vestiges of that self-righteousness now have me thinking that this is just one of the many cases where I've been punished for doing the right thing. But was it the right thing? I saved myself some cash, and spared the few people who would have heard it the consternation that I felt for so many of their kids' recorded efforts. But in a sense, I was also fiddling while Rome burned. If I had the benefit of hindsight, I might have gone whole hog just to do my best to catch the twilight of the pre-digital age. It's a chance no one will ever have again.

I'm making it sound like I have an enduring fondness for physical media when that's not entirely the case. I've been dragging my feet a bit, but recently opened an iTunes account, and have purchased a few things that way. One thing holding me back is that I acquired more physical media over the last several years than I've been able to listen to, and so there's really no reason for me to start buying MP3's by the dozen (speaking of which, while the pricing is eminently reasonable, it is waaay too easy to spend a shitload of money on iTunes, so that has me being cautious also). The blossoming of digital distribution is just one part of the story: it's also cheaper and easier to record, edit, design and promote a record, and predictably, everyone is doing all of those things in copious amounts, hence saturating the market and people's attention spans along with it. So, I don't mean to get sentimental over the discs themselves; it's the particular conditions of the era they shaped (or perhaps my mistaken notions about it) that are more worth mourning.

NoDak Reflections

Today marks a blogospheric rite of passage for yours truly as I have the opportunity to blog about a tour for the first time (minus the photos and itineraries of course, as it's company policy 'round these parts not to waste precious bytes and pixels on personal stuff that y'all could care less about, or should).

On September 29, the Copper Street Brass Quintet embarked on a 10-day, 7-city tour of North Dakota, performing 7 concerts and innumerable workshops and masterclasses throughout the state. This was my first tour as part of a professional (rather than a student) ensemble, and predictably, I have a newfound appreciation for touring musicians who are able to bring it night after night under less than ideal conditions, although I have to admit that I've been witness to such relentless bitching from colleagues and teachers over the years that the experience was more one of elucidation than pure shock.

A pre-existing and significantly more acute misgiving about touring (i.e. the fact that it involves burning petroleum) which I brought along with me is documented more extensively here. Rather than focusing on that, though, I want to say a bit about the differences between performing in a metropolitan area of 3 million as opposed to rural towns of 6,000 (or even 600). While I can't be absolutely sure that I'm perceiving things correctly, it certainly seemed to me that many of these small town residents were significantly more appreciative of hearing something they can't just choose to go out and hear any night of the week (or year) than would be a city dweller who has the luxury of taking such concerts for granted.

That's not to say that there are no appreciative listeners whatsoever in the city, or that our group doesn't have something unique about it that elicited such a reception. I'd like to think that both of those things are true. Nonetheless, it's safe to say that the audience for concert music everywhere is not only small, but increasingly fatigued by the barrage of phone calls, e-mails, social networking invites, and fundraising campaigns that musicians and institutions heave at them, and hence, that being on the heaving end of this relationship, it's easy to feel like no one really cares, even if they do but are just to busy or too frazzled to respond.

In light of this dynamic, what this tour has taught me is that there's real value to touring to remote areas after all, both for the performers and the audience, and whether this is the result of quality, novelty, or simple lack of competition doesn't particularly concern me. I felt more appreciated in the last 2 weeks than I normally do in a year. That sounds like I'm seriously trashing my hometown...I certainly have a love/hate relationship with the place, but I'm wondering if this dynamic isn't inevitable given the conditions that exist. It's as simple as supply and demand: having many groups in town creates a buyers' market for concerts, and if this has attendance and revenue implications for musicians, why wouldn't it have social ones as well?

We know that a buyers' market for concerts can't sustain musicians financially, but tend to assume that buyers who don't show up to our particular concert nonetheless value what we do in some generic, relativistic fashion (and in a place like the Twin Cities, they would certainly say they do, and in that very fashion to boot). What if that's not the case? I'm by no means equating financial support with moral support, but wondering whether oversupply of the product might not, in fact, have the exact same effect on both. As a friend of mine who shall remain anonymous once said, "Even smoking weed on the beach in Hawaii gets old after a while." Similarly, at what point does our breathtakingly transcendent musical product or service cease to matter to anyone simply because it's abundant? Or does audiences' seeming inability to distinguish among performances of widely variable quality simply lead to an undue perception of abundance? Don't answer that.

There were, of course, both successes and failures in the attendance category throughout the course of this tour, but there were some very appreciative (and occasionally even well-informed) people in each and every group, which, for me, made the whole thing worthwhile. I've written at least a dozen times in this space that I'd much rather play for one person who cares than for 100 who don't. That's just my opinion, and I know not everyone feels that way, and for a variety of noble and not-so-noble reasons at that. While we certainly would have liked to play exclusively to packed houses, it was gratifying nonetheless (for me, at least) to know that we reached someone each night, dare I say in a way that I'm not sure many of my performances in town have attained over the last few years. The differences in accessibility and marketing between this and the other groups I'm in have a lot to do with this, but so, I think, does location, which has me looking at touring in a slightly more wholesome light, at least for the moment.

haiku_4u

he's lost in the form
furtive glances, panicked looks
oh shit, where's the bridge?

attention trombones
let's hear the ride one more time
i just love your sound

mix meters freely
throw in a sharp here and there
all the singers faint

faculty concert
claim ownership of bebop,
then play it poorly

conducting teacher
hypes perfunctory gestures
god bless your left hand

he may be god's son,
but I still won't play at church
unless you pay me

read in c, jerk-offs
a d is only an f
in saxophone land

the diminished scale
does not equate to hipness,
but sax men think so

a chorus consists
of new music detractors
the suburbs are worse

women flock to him
in spite of all the wrong notes
justice is deaf, too

musicologists
feign relevant ideas,
prefer fairy-tales

jazz is still the shit
without chord tones on strong beats
get a life jamey

More Inreach

Since the "Death of Music" discussion invariably intersects with the audience outreach and development discussion, here's a follow-up on the latter, which was actually in the works well before the former got me all riled up. Sometimes things just work out...

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It seems to me that form is generally thought to be the musico-technical area where the novice and the specialist differ most greatly, perhaps even on as basic a level as merely being aware of the concept of a structural "big picture" in the first place. As such, it has become the go-to topic for many an outreach activity. This is not to say that the words "form" or "structure" are necessarily used all that frequently in such cases; they may not be used at all, but nevertheless, the idea that the ability to identify structural landmarks is what separates people who "get it" from people who don't seems to hold sway with quite a few musical missionaries.

There are larger issues here which I've chosen to gloss over for now, such as how long it takes for such musico-technical training to meaningfully sink in, and whether or not it is, in fact, the key ingredient to engaging and retaining new listeners in the first place. In the interest of space, I would again refer readers to my previous post on the topic, where these issues are discussed a bit more thoroughly. For the moment, let's just assume that the answers to those last two questions are both affirmative; why, then, choose to focus on form, and what are the consequences of this choice?

I posited above that form represents the most severe disconnect between professional musicians and new listeners. Many academics would tell us that "moment-to-moment" listening is shallow and limited, representing the ultimate inability to see the forest for the trees. The integration, development, and transformation of themes that classical theorists and musicologists tend latch on to often occurs across many minutes or even hours of music. In their defense, it bears pointing out that hour-long instrumental pieces have ceased to be novel in classical music ever since Beethoven, who died almost two centuries ago. Even so, such large-scale structural awareness remains a foreign concept to listeners with a history of nearly exclusive exposure to shorter musical forms. These shorter forms most certainly deal in variation and repetition as well, but the overall temporal units are significantly smaller and material is typically repeated much more literally.

As for explaining why certain people gravitate towards certain music, the nature-versus-nurture discussion is endlessly intriguing, but I don't think it lends itself particularly well to reverse engineering for the purpose of proselytizing for new audiences. I sense that it's neither practical nor desirable to attempt to gain control over listeners with the goal of achieving a specific outcome, and that there will always be numerous exceptions to any rule one might be tempted to establish. I do think it's safe to say that even listeners who bear an innate predisposition for structural contemplation will never experience it if they never have the opportunity, and hence that if nothing else, there's certainly good work to be done in the realm of take-it-or-leave-it exposure. I also think it's crucial to establish that structural awareness is not anathema to moment-to-moment listening, but in fact encompasses it; that they are not different things, but that one is a necessary precondition to the other; and that those who believe in the primacy of "the big picture" ought not forget this.

Moment-to-moment listening may be limited; it may gloss over the greatest accomplishments of many great musicians; and its predominance over structural listening among novice classical and jazz listeners may in fact be a direct consequence of an overly pervasive pop music aesthetic; but its primacy to the listening experience is undeniable and its influence is inescapable, whether in professional musicologists, rank amateur musicians, or the most musically naive among us. If the moment-to-moment sounds of a piece turn us off, then the whole piece turns us off. It's that simple. In absence of an attraction to what is commonly called music's "surface," mere "appreciation" (what an awful term) of the structure and development of a piece is not merely worthless, but I would think downright impossible.

While new music detractors love to accuse their enemies of exactly this pose, I've always had my doubts as to whether this is actually the case, there or anywhere else. I don't believe that atonal music is incapable of having an attractive surface simply by virtue of being atonal, and I certainly don't believe that anyone who claims such an attraction to atonal music is necessarily posing. But most importantly, I also don't believe that we can expect those for whom the surface of any particular piece is not attractive to simply ignore it and focus exclusively on structural elements instead. That's asking way too much.

You can dance around the surface all you want, but you can't make people ignore it. No one can ignore it, and they shouldn't ignore it anyway for crying out loud. That's just silly. One comes to care about (or even bother to think about) form only after the surface has drawn them in, but this process is one which can't be meddled with, forcibly drilled in, or lectured into behaving properly. Some may find it more plausible that structural listening could be taught, and that is undoubtedly how form has become the centerpiece of so many outreach activities, but even so, that's putting the cart before the horse. It's a sham, and neither an honest nor an effective way of addressing a shortage of butts in seats.

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While I've been using atonality as an example to this point, what got me writing this post in the first place was actually not atonal music at all, but rather jazz music. While classical musicologists certainly love them some large-scale tonality, I think that jazz musicians are even more prone to agonize over form when it comes to outreach than are classical people. The forms that jazz was built on are popular music forms, and hence, it is that much more agonizing for a jazz musician to be told by a pop-literate audience member after a performance that they have no idea what the hell just happened. That this happens all the time should tell us something about the respective roles of structural and surface listening. It should also leave us looking in, not out, for a solution.

There is, indeed, some common ground to work with here if our goal is merely to explain what, in fact, did just happen structurally and how it's not all that different from what happens elsewhere. Here as always, though, the problem with dealing so heavily in larger temporal units is that one sells short moment-to-moment sound and continuity. Form may ultimately prove to be important or even essential in creating a lasting relationship with the music, but there are so many other things that can turn off a listener long before they even have a chance to become meaningfully aware of it. I'm not nitpicking about audiophile subtleties, either; I'm talking about things as basic as instruments being too loud or too soft, or people who dislike the sound of a particular timbre or harmony.

Like it or not, these moment-to-moment concerns are make-or-break concerns, but I don't believe for a second that the solution is for listeners to ignore them in favor of ungrounded structural contemplation, nor is it for musicians to merely pander to the lowest common denominator. To the contrary, I believe that mere exposure is more powerful than proselytizing, and that our goal as musicians should not be to convince as many people as possible to tolerate us, but to reach the particular people (however few of them there are) for whom our music is enough by itself, without marketing, proselytizing or peer pressure. I also have come to believe through experience that sharing a performance with these listeners is eminently more fulfilling and enjoyable than the alternative, no matter how few of them there are.

As musicians, it is as important to respect the informed judgments of listeners who reject our work as it is to seek out those to whom it appeals. As such, I believe that the way to reach new listeners is not to subsume one's voice in the most marketable styles, but to invest the necessary time and effort to consummate this voice on its own terms. In short, what I'm saying is that rather than doing music different, we ought to do music better, reaching in, not out, for a solution. Big of me to issue such a challenge, since I could certainly work harder and play better myself, but I want to hone in on one particular facet of jazz performance that we could all stand to do better at, though, unfortunately, it's too often out of our control.

Generalizations are always dangerous, but I've come to believe (long before writing this) that "clarity" is an excellent catch-all term for what distinguishes great jazz performances from the rest of them. Furthermore, I would hypothesize that performances which fail to attain a high degree of so-called "clarity" don't stand a chance in hell of engaging the uninitiated listener (nor an experienced one for that matter). I would propose that instead of wasting our time reaching out by lecturing people about bridges and turnarounds, perhaps we should reach in and make it our single-minded goal to achieve an ideal level of "clarity" in our jazz performances.

What do I mean by clarity? Many things, but first and foremost, it's an acoustical matter. There are exceedingly few rooms that truly suit jazz's acoustic identity, and even fewer competent engineers capable of achieving truly balanced and clear live sound in them. Of course, balance and clarity are primary technical concerns of any musician or ensemble worth their salt, but these battles are hard won and the deck can too easily be stacked against us. Just ask symphony orchestras, who not only spend countless hours fine tuning balance issues, but typically have spent eight- or nine-figure sums of money designing and constructing their own performance spaces with the input of multiple eminent world experts on acoustics. Not surprising when one considers that issues of "clarity" or "transparency" can make or break the careers and reputations of their music directors; suffice it to say that if the same were true in jazz, there would be a lot of broken careers out there.

In jazz, the string players don't come in 10-packs (thank god), the percussion are not in the very back of a large hall, and the very directional winds and brass are not always able or willing to point in the right direction, yet the traditional small jazz group has at least one member of each of these instrumental families represented, and along with them, a built-in acoustical nightmare. The rare ensemble which has taken the time and trouble to achieve a clear acoustic balance in their rehearsal space will likely find the venues at which they perform to be both drastically different acoustically, and, in the form of their proprietors, drastically less willing to accommodate an acoustic performance in the first place, hence taking matters of balance and clarity out of the hands of trained and experienced musicians and putting them in the hands of whichever bartender happens to be doing sound that night. Eight- or nine-figure sums of money would indeed solve the problem, but that's a pipe dream for all but a select few jazz organizations, and even those for whom it is a reality seem strangely content to continue performing in concert halls that were designed specifically for symphony orchestras.

While acoustical clarity is paramount in any musical performance, the element of my broad concept of "clarity" that more directly relates to the above discussion about audience outreach in jazz is that of structural clarity, and specifically, I believe, harmonic clarity. I'm not unaware of the pitfalls of putting such a concept on a pedestal: there are styles of jazz I enjoy immensely where it simply isn't a concern, as well as plenty of performances which strive to attain it, fail miserably, yet somehow are effective in some other way. I'm not trashing people who can't or won't play changes by way of a conscious artistic choice, I'm just trying to relate the concept of clarity to the audience outreach activities I'm aware of in the jazz area, which typically deal with the common practice "mainstream" bebop and post-bop styles of the 1940's, 50's and 60's. Within that very narrow stylistic area, I have no reservations whatsoever about saying that harmonic clarity is what separates the men from the boys.

So, giving the benefit of the doubt for just a second to those who advocate for form-centric audience outreach, let's establish that harmonic clarity is an absolute precondition for a jazz listening experience that is more structural and less moment-to-moment. This is not to say that the changes need be played the same way every time, just that the structure of the tune is clear at all times. Performances by eminent jazz musicians who purposely obliterate the original changes usually achieve far greater clarity than those by novice musicians who are just trying to "get through" the tune by playing it the same way every time. In the right hands, the three A sections of an improvisation over an AABA structure each have their own character, and I have several times walked into a performance in progress and known immediately not only which tune was being played but which A section I was hearing. That says something about me, too, a fact which advocates of musico-technical outreach would be quick to point out; but it also says something about the band, for as I'm sure may of you reading this can relate to, I have also gotten hopelessly lost in the form on many occasions, both listening and playing, while in the company of incompetent players performing material I know upside down and backwards.

Performing jazz is not about merely "following" the abstract structure, but rather about listening and reacting to those around you. That's why on the rare occasion that an eminent jazz musician drops an A section, the band stays together and sounds good doing it, and why when a student musician drops an A section, the other students in the band get lost immediately and everything falls apart. I am by no means convinced that our goal in reaching out to new listeners ought to be to teach them to experience the performance like a player, but if it is, then let's establish that merely drilling them on how to keep track of A's and B's doesn't qualify as such a thing in the first place.

Two musicians came to mind immediately when I started thinking about the clarity issue, and they are both pianists: Fred Hersch and Kenny Barron. If I were leading a new listener recruitment effort, these two would be my go-to guys when it came time to play records for the group. In my mind, their playing is as close to the ideal embodiment of "clarity" in bebop and post-bop jazz as I've ever heard, not just harmonically, but also technically and structurally. Their playing, compositions and arrangements are not only accessible but downright catchy on a moment-to-moment level as well. As for other instruments, my horn section dream team would be Terrell Stafford, Vincent Herring and Conrad Herwig. Dave Holland and Tain Watts would fill out the rhythm section.

Of course, you're not going to get this band together tomorrow and start running out to high school auditoriums in rural Minnesota, and even if you could, we all know that with musical ensembles, the whole is not always equal to the sum of its parts. I made the list for two reasons: first, to try to give the reader an idea of what exactly I meant by "clarity," and second, to make the point that when it comes to audience development, it's not worth bothering unless we put our best foot forward. We all know that outreach is inextricably linked with grant funding, and that many grants either require it as a precondition to the project, or offer additional funding above and beyond the initial award if the recipient adds it to their plan. What this means, though, is that most of the time, it's not the Clarity Dream Team providing the music, but rather some other team of grant funded musicians whose success in securing funding may or may not correspond to their musical abilities.

I'm not trashing anyone who's ever had a grant. There are a gazillion musicians out there who fall somewhere in between competent and brilliant, and that's sufficient for most purposes most of the time. Nonetheless, if the band, the room, and the soundperson alike can't deliver the musical goods to the newbies, it's a waste of time from an outreach perspective, and we'd be better served to go practice until this is no longer the case. That many musicians rely on this funding is unfortunate, a fact which lays bare my greatest reservation about the concept of outreach: the uncomfortable balance of selfless and selfish motivations that it requires. Human beings are generally too inherently selfish to strike this pose effectively, and hence, I feel that directing our efforts in rather than out is both the most productive and honest approach when it comes time to present our music to someone for the first time.