[sc]airquotes (ii)

"...speaking as a precocious therapist as well as a true philistine, Plato insinuates that mimetic art is a sort of perversion–a substitute, deflected, compensatory activity engaged in by those who are impotent to be what as a pis aller they merely imitate. And who, Plato asks, would choose the appearance of the thing over the thing itself; who would settle for a picture of someone he could have, as it were, in the flesh; or would pretend to be something in preference to being the thing as such? Those who can, do, we might interpret him as having maintained; those who can't, imitate."

Arthur Danto. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1981. 12.


A philistine, my dictionary app tells me, is "a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them," which if we define "the arts" the way Danto does I suppose I am. "In the philosophy of science," he writes, "there are no observations without theories; so in the philosophy of art there is no appreciation without interpretation. Interpretation consists in determining the relationship between a work of art and its material counterpart." (p. 113). A problem, I might add, which clearly belongs to a particular art-historical epoch, even if it was always there lurking behind the cloak of improbability: it was not until artworks had known material counterparts (identical objects which were not artworks themselves) that the question he seeks to answer here became a pressing one.

For Danto, the non-art material counterparts serve as a kind of control group: by bringing into higher relief the differences between them and those things identical to them in every way except in being artworks, we home in on the essence of art itself. It is an unusually persuasive approach precisely because it describes so well the reality of the art world. A suitemate of mine here at school, a visual artist, showed a work earlier this year that was painted with mixture of paint and his own blood, but this was not transparent in the work; rather, blood was the final entry on the materials list, which in my lack of art world acculturation I merely skimmed without interpreting. I found the work aesthetically pleasing anyway and offered the compliment, but he was none too happy and an animated discussion ensued later that night with roommates and guests alike polarized into what in the language of Danto you might call the Philistines and the Interpreters. It is thus more clear to me that Danto has identified an important feature of the art world he inherited than that he has located the essence of art. I get the sense from this book as well as his "After The End of Art" that much as music theorists analyze the music which their theoretical tools enable them to analyze, Danto seeks to explain the things that philosophy can explain, and aestheticism is not one of them. (Fine with me, by the way, that we not try too hard to explain it, but I often wonder if simply ignoring it is the best course of action.)

And so to return just briefly to Plato and his insistence on being over imitating, I would say that for me the most powerful thing about abstract art is the fact that it is the real version of itself. I would call this quality "immediacy" if that word had not already been claimed for the opposite usage by those who would insist that every work of art is representational of something or other, and that the higher the degree of abstraction, the less "immediate" the impact (Danto might say the more interpretation is necessary). I think there is similarly something to be said for such abstract works which cannot in any sense be called commonplace, or in other words, whose hypothetical material counterparts do not yet exist. Call my theory "The Fetishization of the Anomalous." The best part about being a philistine, I guess, is that you get to be a hedonist as well.

The Now-Annual Placeholder Post

Long day today. Terrible day for blogging. Sometimes the end of the semester clubs you over the head, and other times it's death by a thousand cuts. It's the latter case this time around: no big projects or papers, no flurry of recitals or gigs, just a seemingly endless list of one-time menial tasks (like, uh, writing a blog entry every day for a month). I have to admit, though, that it beats the alternative. Overcommitment is a problem all college music students face at some point, but I have to think CalArts is about the most dangerous place for it ever created. There is a clear pattern among the MFA students: smorgasbord first year, retrenchment second year. Guilty as charged, I am. It was a productive semester, though, and this is where I'm supposed to say I can't believe how quickly three semesters passed and I can't believe there's only one left. Actually, I can totally believe it. The school year runs from September to May; two years of school is bound to feel like less than two calendar years because, well, it is. That's as much a reason as any why I didn't apply to masters programs my last year of college, and why I'm not applying to doctoral programs right now. It can ruin your entire school year. I'm suspect I'm watching it happen to a couple of folks right now, unfortunately. Too bad. There will be plenty of time for that kind of thing after I've squeezed every last drop out of this this place. It's privilege that a lot of people don't have, and I wish more people here behaved that way.

On Charity

Those who can't do, teach found non-profits.

Reinforcement

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

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

Aebersold Goes Digital (and I missed it?)

It seems that Jamey Aebersold has finally made his (in)famous Play-Along recordings available digitally and by the track. If anyone else still does eMusic, this link will deliver you to the promised land; iTunes has them as well, though it itself remains an evil place.

Once upon a time in a past life and far away land, where digital distribution remained a novelty and I trolled the JA online forum with a regularity I'd rather not admit, this was a near-constant topic of discussion, or at least remark; equally constant, at that time at least, was JA's insistence that digital was untenable for them for one reason or another. (Licensing is the obvious one, but I also think people my parents' age simply weren't ready to give in yet regardless of the other considerations.) I can't tell for sure when they took the plunge, but it looks to have been earlier this year. Many albums on both eMusic and iTunes bear what I suspect to be their original release dates, not their digital ones, but true to form, it's clearly not consistent either way, and suddenly the luddites' fears seem less irrational than they did ten years ago. In any case, whether this all just happened or it happened years ago and I missed it, they did wait an awfully long time to do this as it was clear even back then that digital was the wave of the future. I'm not sure if the lack of a digital presence explains why some of the younger jazz students at CalArts have never heard of Mr. Aebersold, or if there's something else going on, but in any case, someone or other has kept him in business long enough to finally make the leap.

The Ratio

CalArts is a place of many paradoxes, contradictions and plain old headscratchers, not the least of which is that a music school with such collective irreverence for academic rigor is also a well-known hotspot for JI/microtonal people, who tend by definition to be among the more academically rigorous musicians you'll ever meet. By "academically rigorous," I suppose I really mean "able and willing to do arithmetic in their heads," which normally isn't saying much, but anyone who's been to polite bourgie music school knows that, in this case, it is.

When I arrived at the U of MN, there still existed something called General College, which was essentially a community college within the university. This served two main purposes: it enabled the athletes to play Division I sports while doing junior college academics, and it enabled the undergraduate music majors to take what was understood to be a high school-level class in order to meet the single such requirement imposed by the College of Liberal Arts. (It was not math or science but the foreign language(!) requirement which was waived for music majors in order to accommodate the boatload of coursework within our major, a stunningly counterintuitive if not downright misguided decision; but then, if I'm allowed to embark on a discussion of the many "paradoxes, contradictions and plain old headscratchers" at the ol' U, Blog Month might spill into next year...so we'll leave it there for now.)

In Genesis of a Music, Harry Partch writes:

An acoustician writes in his book that Just Intonation is impossible of attainment in a practical system of music, a psychologist repeats this in his book, authors of harmony repeat it in their books, and finally a veritable army of theorists, composers, and instrumentalists repeats it verbally–of whom not one in a hundred thousand can speak from personal experience. (p. 424)

Such it is that the rest of the students here aren't always on board with this whole thing, up to and including what I perceive as downright defensive reactions to the notion that the study of tuning systems is actually relevant to people who work within one or more of them. It only seems more essential to me the more I learn about it, but I sometimes wonder if this won't actually be the last place on Earth to require such coursework of its music students, threatening as that requirement would to severely harm their buzz.

[sc]airquotes (i)

"One important aspect of Afrological improvisation is the notion of the importance of personal narrative, of 'telling your own story'...

...An Afrological notion of an improviser's 'sound' may be seen as analogous to the Eurological concept of compositional 'style,' especially in a musically semiotic sense. Moreover, for an improviser working in Afrological forms, 'sound,' sensibility, personality, and intelligence cannot be separated from an improviser's phenomenal (as distinct from formal) definition of music. Notions of personhood are transmitted via sounds, and sounds become signs for deeper levels of meaning beyond pitches and intervals. The saxophonist Yusef Lateef (1985-88, 44) makes it plain: "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising. We feel that we can hear character or personality in the way the musician improvises...

...Interestingly, Cage's critique of jazz also likens it to personal storytelling. Cage's description of jazz seems to liken the music to a ring shout: 'The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking-that is, in succession-like in a panel discussion .... If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words' (quoted in Zwerin 1991, 162). This perceptive comment from a composer who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be portrayed as possessing any affinity with Afrological musical forms, provides some intersubjective justification for the notion that one of the central aesthetic demands made on Afrological improvisers is that the improviser 'tell a story.'

In any event, Eurological improvisers have tended to look askance on the admission of personal narrative into improvisative activity. I believe that, for postwar Eurological improvisers, the ideas of Cage have, again, had the greatest impact in this regard: 'What I would like to find is an improvisation that is not descriptive of the performer, but is descriptive of what happens, and which is characterized by an absence of intention'(quoted in Kostelanetz 1987, 222).

George E. Lewis
Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives
Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 241-242



Professor Lewis is more or less beyond reproach, and nothing he says here is debatable in the sense that it is inaccurate. I for one am struck, rather, by what is not said. The validity/usefulness/expressive power of personal narrative would seem to my Eurologically-inclined sensibilities to be almost completely dependent on the nature and content of the narrative in question, and not simply projectable a priori across an entire culture (less yet to others) without case-by-case evaluation of this content. In other words, apples-and-oranges characterizations fail when one prefers Granny Smiths to Clementines and Navels to Red Delicious. Mustn't we be allowed our own value judgments as to who's story matters to us? And if we simply don our dreadlocks and patchouli oil and decide that everyone's story matters, does anyone's story really matter?

Lewis makes no explicit endorsement of such expansive relativism, but nor does he avail himself of a readymade opportunity submit it to the same kind of fruitful interrogation the Eurological view receives in ensuing paragraphs. It's plain enough even to someone like me that, "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising," so plain, actually, that I'm not sure what we've really established by stopping there. The deeper questions, I think, are about the nature and importance of this knowledge to the listener and the citizen.

In any case, I continue to maintain that I'm not nearly interesting enough to be the focal point of my own music, or alternatively, that if the most interesting thing about my music is that I made it, I've probably not achieved much. The question of individuality, highly valued in Afrological thought according to Lewis et al, is thus related, but nor is uniqueness broadly construed any more sufficient, in my opinion, than narrativity broadly construed to confer value on any given work without considering what is unique and how the story actually goes.

Semi-Annual Anti-Amplification Rant

I've lost track of how many times I've heard well-meaning live sound technicians and recording engineers state their unfaltering belief that the purpose of live sound reinforcement is simply to boost the overall level and not to balance the ensemble. And yet as numerous as these pronouncements are, they're not nearly as numerous as the number of small to medium-sized performance spaces which house a sound system.

A world in which one has recourse to sound reinforcement only to reinforce and not to balance is a world in which hard-wired sound systems are the exclusive domain of sports arenas and the great outdoors. In any case, sitting in CalArts' Roy O. Disney Concert Hall (misnamed really since most schools would call a room that size a "Recital Hall"), it occurs to me that I can count on one hand the number of instruments I've heard in person there or anywhere else which would truly require amplification in such a small space simply to be fully audible.

Of course, there are many fruitful musical endeavors (i.e. solo tuba with big band, to name one quite near if somewhat less dear), which artificial balancing enables; call them "works of fiction," as one of my frequent collaborators does. We'd be loathe to throw that baby out with the bathwater, and yet I'd gladly limit myself to working in "non-fiction" for the rest of my life if it meant I never again had to sit ten feet from a needlessly amplified grand piano.

Learning To Love You More Assignment #60

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

Bathroom Light In Room B-3 Left On Overnight

In testament to the high degree of self-absorption among art school graduate students and in spite of their lofty claims to be making the world a better place, the bathroom light in Ahmanson Hall room B-3 has been left on overnight for the third time in four days. Because all housing fees are paid in full at the beginning of the academic year, the steep electric bill which such behavior typically precipitates and which in turn tends to serve as its strongest deterrent will not be forthcoming, thus ensuring the light will be left on for hundreds more unnecessary hours yet this school year. All six residents of B-3 deny involvement in the matter and have no further comment at this time. Intra-suite discussion of the light has also been tabled indefinitely pending the development of sufficient resentment among the residents to engender further talks. Residents ask that the media respect their privacy during this difficult time. Requests for interviews will not be granted.

Doctor Doctor

There seems to be an entire office at CalArts devoted to spamming students with links to opportunities which may or may not be relevant to them, but a recent missive detailing four faculty vacancies at the University of Northern Colorado School of Music caught my eye, first because it's a school I've attended, but also because while it is made clear that candidates with doctorates are preferred, only one of the four announcements (for a position in voice of all things) takes a hard line.

For all the handwringing over the perception that "you practically need a doctorate to teach sixth grade nowadays," it's hard to find evidence of this without being on the inside of the search process. I've never attended a music school that didn't have a significant contingent of undoctored faculty in some of its highest-ranking positions, and I don't think I'd want to. It will be very interesting over the coming decades to see if everyone's dystopian visions of a perfectly insular academic music world come true, and further, given the present "tough economic times" and dwindling private financial support and return on investment for endowments and the like, whether admission to the doctorate club becomes even more a matter of buying oneself in than it already is.

A final word here about CalArts, to my knowledge one of the exceedingly few Art Schools with a music department, and at that, an Art School with exactly one doctoral program, in music. That us musicians would need to create more and more credentials for ourselves to earn makes perfect sense considering that we're typically said to be valued below most of the other arts; indeed, if the proverbial aliens landed, it wouldn't be difficult for them to infer the rest of the valuation landscape simply by noting the size, prestige and rigor of the other graduate programs here. And while academic credentials are by no means universally admired in contemporary American society, they are far more universally admired than any given art practice, and as the only such concrete acknowledgments of our existence available, artists simply crave them. You can no longer prove your worth to the world by making Great Art, but you can still break the socio-political ice in conversation with a red-stater by mentioning that you have a degree in what you do. I've done it many times, often to my surprise. This dynamic in and of itself is not necessarily to be lamented, but the feedback loops it might create within the actual realm of art and art-making give one pause.

December (yes, December) is Blog Month

December is Blog Month here at Fickle Ears, which means it's about to get hella in(s)ane up in this shit. Enjoy the intellectual carnage.

Prior intros here, here, here and here.

Prior outros here, here, here and here.

Behold the entire streaming pile here, here, here and here.

Blog Month V. Game On.®

What Really Matters? No, Really...

The extrinsic benefit discussion is hardly unique to music and musicians; rather, it seems that virtually every field of endeavor is falling all over itself to claim utility outside of its own domain. Some of these claims clearly have legs (as in youth sports programs fighting childhood obesity), others less so (as in youth sports programs teaching teamwork; seriously, did anyone learn anything other than nepotism, selfishness and nihilism on their pee-wee baseball team?). Either way, however, I do wonder sometimes if "what really matters" has not become a permanently moving target, forbidden as we so often are these days, whether by culture, politics, or finances, from being so bold as to locate anything in particular at the top of this food chain.

Without such an anchor, the result is an endless cycle of faux-altruism and self-denial. Science fiction "encourage[s] people to think about our world and what it might become?" Or does it offer them escape from these thoughts? Public radio is the "backbone" of our emergency alert systems? The thought of a major disaster leaving behind only the most devoted Current listeners to take the reins of human civilization is more frightening than the specter of such a disaster itself. And consider golf, the game most widely proclaimed to teach honesty which nonetheless makes a cheater of virtually everyone who goes near it.

I worry that in trying so hard to paper over the inherently self-interested nature of every human thought and action we threaten to maim our culture beyond recognition. There is a self-fulfilling, self-destructive aspect to all of this posturing, namely that by insisting on the primacy of our utility to a slippery, calculated conception of universal value over more idealistic concerns specific to our disciplines, we more or less prevent our work and ourselves from blossoming into something with clear intrinsic value. And to be sure, extrinsic values are always derived from intrinsic ones, period. The "anchor" is a constellation, not a monolith. Skimming the cream means severing the limb, and reverse engineering is playing with fire.

JCOI Wrap

I recently attended Phase I of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute and was asked to write a wrap-up of sorts for New Music Box, which you can read here.

Toward a New Isolation (iv)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (iii)

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

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Concessions on Cliche

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

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

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

Toward a New Isolation (i)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same Difference (ii)

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

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

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

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

Same Difference (i)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog Month IV: Perfunctory Terminal Posting

Meh.

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

Survey: Should This Blog Be Hosted Elsewhere?

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

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

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

Flavor of the (Final) Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


•TeledyN

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


•Schoenberg

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


•Big Mouths

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


•Alphabet Soup

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


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

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

Blogkeeping

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

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

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

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

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

Walling

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

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

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

The Transient Repertoire

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

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

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