Exit Strategies IV: Equal Time

Regular readers, if I have any, are no doubt accustomed to a steady diet of negativity and skepticism regarding just about every topic I choose to address. CalArts issues certainly have not been excepted. In my defense, I can only insist that a pure nihilist and absolute skeptic would not see the need to pour so much time and effort into polishing his purely nihilistic, absolutely skeptical evaluations of the world into moderately presentable prose missives and uploading them into an already-bizarre web-based interface which, to boot, is rendered only semi-functional by the age of his decaying computer. The worldview of this hypothetical person is one whereby the tasks to which I typically set myself here are superfluous. I see fit to mention that every so often just in case it's not otherwise obvious.

Quite to the contrary, I happen to cling to a garden-variety blogospheric aspiration that I think unites many writers of seemingly disparate orientations and styles, namely the faith that spewing our vitriol all over the internet might eventually have some small impact on someone else's thinking on a subject of particular importance to us both, even if that impact is merely to sharpen and clarify a dissenting view, and further, that the act of engaging in this dialogue is of limited but nonetheless vital importance to building and sustaining a functional, living and conscientious musical culture, such a culture being one small but necessary facet of a similarly functional and conscientious larger society.

Such it is that lurking beneath my outer cynic is an inner utopian, and I don't just mean in having the audacity to think people might actually read, but rather to imagine that by doing so they might come to understand the world a little bit better for the purpose of improving it. That is why I have invested a bit more than people of my parents' generation might recommend in following a variety of other music-oriented blogs, and it is ultimately just what I aspire to offer here for whoever might be up for it, even if it seems on the surface that I'm just a chronic bellyacher. Having said all of that, I do occasionally give thought to the overwhelmingly negative character of this blog and what that means for me, for the reader, and yes, for the world. To wit, as I've now more or less exorcised my grad school grievances, it occurs to me that some "equal time" is indeed in order, be as it may destined to fall well short of truly balancing the amount of criticism I've already leveled.

So...[clears throat]...My time at CalArts was a transformative experience in the fullest and most positive sense of that term. Two years is not nearly long enough to fully avail oneself of the human, curricular and physical resources of this school, and yet I doubt that I have ever been more productive during any other period of my life, at least not across all of my concurrent musical interests at once, a direct credit to an institution that is uniquely conducive to and encouraging of the kind of informed eclecticism that has marked my musical maturity. Similarly, what I have seen and heard so far from the network of recent and not-so-recent CalArtian musicians living and working in the greater Los Angeles area is staggering in both technical polish and creative potency. The end-times-like vibe of so many current extramusical events notwithstanding, there is greater potential here for me than I yet know quite what to do with, and I quite look forward to figuring it out.

There. Is that better?

Making A Habit Of It: A Second Lapse Into Foodblogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buying Christian Scott

Skeptical of those jazz media darlings right about now? Don't sleep on Christian Scott. A Spotify investigation into the work of the Nextboppy trumpeter about town has landed me firmly on board. Scott's trumpet playing is merely solid, but his music as a whole strikes me as the total package. It has an intangible quality about it that far surpasses more simplistic, self-conscious notions of balancing groove with headiness, and his string of consistently great albums at this stage of his career is stunning, an outcome all the resources and media coverage in the world can't guarantee. Except perhaps for his age in light of so many jazz elders who have not received one, I would not have batted an eye if he had received a MacArthur this year. Seriously.

Here is one of my favorites, taking what could legitimately be called trite materials and transforming them into something extraordinary through counterpoint, structure, and pacing:

Selling Vijay Iyer

Iyer is feeling the blogospheric heat after receiving a MacArthur "Genius" award, and while no one could possibly claim to be surprised by his selection (frankly, that should include himself), I have to confess that it indeed disappoints me in that Regina Carter sort of way. Kurt Rosenwinkel's scathing evaluation of Iyer's playing ("No touch, no tone, no melody, nothing exceptional in any way") is a bit too harsh; I would simply say that for Iyer, the piano is a noise-maker, a keyboard that he plays like a drum set. It's an eminently valid approach to music-making, but a strange choice of instrument for the purpose, and as a result, his music has always struck me as tone-deaf in a not-so-constructive way. I've been over this with friends and in the end we have had to agree to disagree. Some people sincerely dig it in direct proportion to the hype; for better or worse, I am not one of them.

As for whether Iyer is a "genius," I'm open to both earnest and cynical interpretations to that effect, both entirely unrelated to his piano playing. Even so, Rosenwinkel's larger point that Iyer's success "reflects a snowball effect of the power of the critics and the industry to select their darling and push that person to the Nth degree" deserves to be taken seriously. In this case, though, Kurt could actually have gone further: Iyer is nothing less than this industry's perfect storm, neither white nor black, and a loudly self-proclaimed autodidact who nonetheless holds a PhD from a world-renowned university. Under those circumstances, someone would actually have to have it out for him just to stop all the accolades from pouring in; indeed, he himself had to walk back the Huffington Post after a headline lauding him as "America's Greatest Living Jazz Pianist" appeared in the wake of his MacArthur. Not that anyone's feeling sorry for him right now, but his fitness for visibility is clearly a burden on as well as a vehicle for his music. Most of us are still working towards our breakthrough, and one hopes none of this gets in his way.

Catch my references and read the whole story here and here.

For a work of proto-genius, check out the track "Habeas Corpus" on the record "Blood Sutra."

Priorities

A typically green New Music Box article about teaching 4-part writing develops into an atypically productive and stimulating discussion. Commenter Sam L. Richards makes, for me, the key contribution, which deserves to be reblogged at length:

I think if the classroom is going to focus on four-part writing, there must be a sufficient justification for doing so; there must be a sufficient justification for placing a particular style of chorale writing of a particular Austro-Germanic composer from a very particular time period at the center of our 21st-century music pedagogy. When viewed like this, our four-part pedagogical preoccupations appear to be a rather specialized skill. Indeed, writing a good four-part chorale is a rather specialized skill, as is writing a Chopin-like nocturne, a Webern-like short, an Adams-like whirlwind, or a Muhly-like musing. [SK interjects: Dude, you're on a roll here, but please never utter that last name in the company of the other three again.] Bach-like chorale writing is a prerequisite to none of these.

It is important to also acknowledge that a four-part writing centric pedagogy also necessarily, yet often clandestinely, emphasizes and educates with only a few musical parameters in mind: pitch and harmony. Timbre, texture, trajectory, energetics, emotion, rhythm, meaning, cognition, context, feminism, an engagement of philosophical aesthetics, et al are usually not only marginalized, but not engaged at all. These are not advanced subjects whose reservation for a graduate course can be easily justified.[SK's emphasis added] They are now essential elements of the current musico-theoretical discourse. Most of the parameters which appear in my partial list above can easily be engaged in conjunction with pitch and harmony; in other words, one need not first master the esoteric art of baroque part-writing before they begin to engage musical meaning. One need not learn to mimic the chorale style of a particular period in order to learn about energetics. The limited mode in which pitch and harmony are so frequently taught is not a prerequisite to musical learning, musical thinking, or, to invoke the late Adam Krims, an engagement of “theory about music”.

I fear that our pedagogy often educates our students into cultural irrelevance instead of out of it. While acknowledging that such a style, no doubt, possesses harmonic, and voice-leading similarities to many other styles, placing it at the center or treating it as a foundation of one’s early musical training (or later musical training) is not only a pedagogical move, but an aesthetic one which serves to marginalize other styles which do not “adhere” to its practices.

Can I get an amen, hold the plagal cadence?

Wants and Needs

Hermes Camacho, an instructor with Austin Soundwaves, discusses his students:

Many of the kids come in with a variety of challenges, socioeconomic ones being the most common. I’ve taught students in other programs who come from backgrounds where music lessons are a given, and sometimes those students are less personally motivated and more parentally motivated—do you know what I mean? Now, the Soundwaves parents are certainly supportive—they are extremely supportive!—but most of these kids are here first and foremost because they want to be here. In my past experience, there have been times where I wasn’t sure if a student was doing it because they enjoyed playing music or because their parents enjoyed them playing music. That has never been the case with Soundwaves; the kids are doing it because they love it. Also, the parents and siblings are always so excited! The applause at the concerts is deafening, every single time, for every single piece. And I’m talking about Go Tell Aunt Rhody and unison versions of Iron Man. They are cheering like it’s the best thing they’ve ever heard, and the enthusiasm is, in my experience, unprecedented.

Secretary of Outreach

George Colligan relates a familiar story, drawn in this case from his early years on the East Coast scene:

What often ends up happening is that whomever can convince every friend they had from middle school on and every extended family member to come out every time they play will be the successful ones. If you spend all of your time shedding, and have a small circle of friends and family who also have a life of their own, you can't expect them to come out every time you play! (I used to do OK at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. when my Dad or Mom would really organize folks to come to my performances. But I did a lot of gigs with local singers who were secretaries by day; they would invite the entire office to their gig once a year and they would pack the place. So this was the beginning of what I thought was an imbalance. The really good local musicians who played on the scene regularly couldn't draw a crowd at Blues Alley; but the amateur folks could do really well with ticket sales.

Indeed, it has always astounded me just how well "amateurs" tend to do with ticket sales and the like, and this dynamic is clearly at the heart of it. However, the dark matter here, that which lurks beneath the observable dynamics and outcomes while dwarfing them in severity, deserves to be articulated too: could it be any clearer that listeners can't tell (or don't care to) the difference between professional and amateur productions, whether they are personally acquainted with the band or not?

Beds of Sin (iii)

This almost hit me in the head at work the other day, so I picked it up after it came to rest and snapped an iPad picture for the blog:

I realize that the pine cone and the maple leaf have their fans, but seriously, isn't this soooo much cooler? There's just something about Los Angeles, from the architecture to the flora to the sunsets. It makes up for the quotidian inconveniences of modern American life in a way that fall colors, dendritic snowflakes, and the IDS Tower just never quite could. And though I've never been one to take overt cues for my music from environmental sources, I do think the aesthetic change of pace has had a charitable impact on me and my work. So sure, come on over everyone. We'll make room for you.

Beds of Sin (ii)

[Fickle Ears makes its first and probably last foray into the issue of human reproduction, posted today in honor of the author's thirty-first birthday]

The only time I've ever heard the notion of population control raised matter-of-factly in conversation was, not surprisingly, among a group of gay men. Even so, I don't think it's possible to come live in Los Angeles from somewhere smaller (even if that somewhere gets called a "big" city) and not have the thought at least cross your mind. And if it is possible not to think that way, then you're free to judge me for having slipped into it anyway, but you won't stop me from thinking it.

Los Angeles is a place where a lot of people would like to live, or think they would. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so it's undoubtedly foolish to think about population control while you're stuck in traffic. If people here had fewer kids, more pasty-faced midwesterners like me would surely flood in, guns and sunscreen bottles blazing, to clog up the freeways again and pursue our acting careers. All of that aside, though, I am constantly reminded here, as I was when I worked at the MSP airport, how lightly people seem to take the notion of having children and how ill-prepared they truly are to handle it. I'm even learning that to be 30 (make that 31) and childless in L.A. arouses a certain amount of...suspicion in working class circles. Now isn't that a tad bit over the top?

As far beyond the pale as, say, a two-child policy might be in the U.S., I'm willing to say that simply leaving sociology and biology to their own devices strikes me personally as no more or less crazy at this point, not when people I work with during the day are heading off to second full-time jobs at night instead of sleeping just to feed their kids; not when we have millions of intelligent people out of work along with millions of underserved children, yet we cannot collectively seem to figure out a way to play those two problems off against each other; and not when children (let's not forget pets in this one, either) are more or less seen as material possessions even by some we would otherwise consider to be among the economically, physically, and socially fittest parents around.

It would be nice to think that simply winning the fight for reproductive rights and affordable health care would solve the problem. It certainly couldn't hurt. I submit to you, however, with all the empathy of a rock that this is a cultural issue as well, one that all the condoms in the world won't fix. So, sorry to be one of those people, but the whole thing just makes me cringe, and more so with each passing year, another of which, I'm reminded today, has just passed before my very eyes thanks to my parents' own one-child policy.

Beds of Sin (i)

"People just keep coming here," a relative of mine once said indignantly, and as if she wasn't talking to one of the more recent emigres. Who wouldn't want to live in Los Angeles? I have feared straight through from the moment the first seed of temptation sprouted in my mind all the way through the present moment that the answer might be: "anyone with a conscience." I've hidden from no one the fact that the climate was always a consideration for me, but I have plenty of better reasons for coming to live here, and so far I'm content that they're all in evidence. And contrary to that peculiar form of midwestern conjecture one is bathed in upon declaring the intent to relocate, I've yet to feel the shadow of the entertainment industry stalking my every artistic move, and I remain unconvinced that people here are, as a group, any more or less superficial than they are back home.

It could not be more transparent, on the other hand, that the whole operation is enabled by a constellation of environmental and humanitarian atrocities the sum total of which I'm not sure many people I've met here know or care much about. Some of the blankest stares I've ever seen have followed what I thought were innocuous questions about water issues, made to people who have lived here their entire lives. Several co-workers of mine have the infuriating habit of taking their lunch breaks in their cars with engines idling and air conditioners blasting away for 30 minutes at a time. These are low-wage earners in the era of $4 per gallon gas; clearly there's no deterrent strong enough to combat animal instincts.

Naturally, my footprint is smaller, but I am an animal just like everyone else, a walking entropy machine complete with central nervous system and reproductive organs to assist in the task. I'm drawn to year-round outdoor basketball, musical communities that are large and informed enough to be self-policing, and double-digit personnel options on just about every instrument I'll ever need to form an ensemble to play my music. The extent of my impact on climate change, air quality, clogged freeways, depleted water supplies, and housing shortages remains to be seen, but this much is (and always was) clear: owing to geography and sociology alike, it will necessarily be larger here than it would have been in Minneapolis or virtually any other place I might have gone; it will be leveled against an environment which is under siege in a way that Minneapolis, despite its own notable sprawl and the alarming recent emergence of its own air quality issues, has never experienced and probably will not experience for a very long time; and it will be leveled at the expense of more desperate, aggrieved and oppressed people than the entire Twin Cities can claim in either number or degree. For all of that, I never had a perfectly clean conscience about coming here, and I never will.

No matter what sorts of high or trying times might await, my living here will always be "me time" through and through. It is a concession to the voice that says "do something for yourself for once" and in direct contravention of the one that says "you've had it pretty good to start with; leave something for everyone else." People just keep coming here, and I didn't have to be one of them, but here I am competing against all the other transplants and quite a few natives of myriad vintages for just about every known resource and privilege a human being might require. I'm crossing my fingers that we don't run out.

Blog Month VI: Return to October

Blog Month just belongs in October, chock full as it already is of playoff baseball, occult holidays, and Kac family birthdays, and this year, no kiddie-show tour or academic institution can stand in our way. So while we've barely caught our breath following last year's festivities, we forge ahead nonetheless towards bigger and better streaming piles, unthinkable depths of cynicism, and an even larger pawprint in the litterbox that is the internet. Let's roll.

For context, and tradition:

The Intros Cometh:
I
II
III
IV
V

The Outros Goeth:
I
II
III
IV
V

(Re)live the content-rich life again and again:
I
II
III
IV
V

Fasten your seatbelts, hold on to your hats, and don't forget to tip your waitress. Blog Month's the name, and inanity's the game...

Answers to Correspondents

From The Musical Times (May 1, 1923):

X.–There is no legal restriction as to the use of the title 'Professor,' but properly speaking it should be reserved for those holding important posts at the great educational centres. If you want to so label yourself, you may, though you had much better not. The title has been made to look ridiculous outside academic circles. We know a chimney sweep who has it over his front door in six-inch letters. He may be a good sweep, but he has a poor sense of humour.

A Teaching Philosophy

The core of my educational philosophy is an emphasis on achieving “functional” musicianship, defined as the possession of skills and experiences which directly serve students’ inclinations and aspirations as creative music-makers. Ultimately, music is not an object but an action, something that people do. It is hence through the ability to “do” that the facile music-maker is uniquely empowered to create, learn, and collaborate.

The pursuit of functional musicianship is necessarily:

(1) integrative of many different modes of music-making. A true balance of emphasis is sought between aural and written skills, pre-composition and improvisation, expression and experimentation, collectivism and individualism, and between cross-disciplinary and uni-disciplinary projects. The flexibility to operate fruitfully at any point along these respective continua presents a compelling model of citizenship and a powerful blueprint for a fulfilling musical life.

(2) style-neutral and pan-stylistic. The musical skills with the broadest stylistic applications are emphasized first. As students are introduced to a range of musical styles and ideas, active participation brings them into immediate touch with essential affinities and disjunctions among musical cultures.

(3) dignified. The instructor treats children as whole people, addressing them without affectation or humor unless it is appropriate. His willingness to be vulnerable and “on a level” with students ensures that they are comfortable constructively challenging his viewpoints. He comports himself in accordance with the values of “core” academic instruction, modeling respect for music and the other arts as indispensable aspects of human existence and worthy, dignified academic pursuits.

(4) rigorous. To emphasize functional musicianship is to recognize that the extrinsic benefits of a musical education are reaped in direct proportion to student achievement in core music-making activities (i.e. performing, composing and recording). In other words, meaningful context in the form of self-directed musical endeavors is the necessary prerequisite for the making of cross-disciplinary connections. When a concept becomes self-evident through an emotional investment in music-making, it is learned forever. A rigorous grounding in foundational musical skills facilitates such connections by enabling the most direct interface with a diversity of musical ideas.

The aversion in cross-disciplinary, arts-centered learning environments to conservatory-style, pre-professional musical training is warranted, and the pressure, competitiveness, and rote learning styles for which the conservatory is infamous have no place in a humane, functional education. Ambivalence towards nitty-gritty music-making is, however, an equally sure recipe for underachievement. A deficit of tactile and emotional engagement with sound in space and time virtually ensures minimal retention of cross-disciplinary connections and cripples students’ ability to engage in social music-making going forward. Insofar as those two concerns are of primary importance, a healthy degree of rigor in foundational skills and concepts is not merely desirable but in fact indispensable. The task of precise calibration must be undertaken anew for each group of students and frequently reevaluated thereafter as group and individual identities continually emerge and evolve.

(5) grounded in taking the long view. The best musical education is the one which keeps on giving. It breaks my heart to work with middle-aged and older adults for whom functional musicianship has remained elusive for years or decades, frustrating their deeply-held desires to “just play” with friends and pick-up groups. By imparting the foundational skills of social music-making at an early age, we not only empower children to live more fulfilling lives, but also condition them to aim high in any and every area of endeavor.

[sc]airquotes (v)

Instead of repeating such Western myths of the noncontingency of artworks, why not search for jazz meanings behind the music, in the life-shapes that gave rise to it and that continue to sustain it? Why not, in other words, scrutinize the interactions between our own rules of formation and those we impute to the makers of jazz as the source of our evaluations of it? Why not create a jazz pedagogy in which our construction of the varieties of black life experience takes priority, saving the music–intricately bound up with those experiences, after all–for last, construing it in light of them and resisting the aestheticizing tendency to exaggerate its differences from other manifestations of expressive culture?

...Placing the music first will always distance it from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that made it and that sustain it. It will always privilege the European bourgeois myths of aesthetic transcendency, artistic purity untouched by function and context, and the elite status of artistic expression. (Such myths concerning the composers of the European canon badly need to be exploded, so it is all the more troubling to see them neatly transferred to African-American composers and performers.) Emphasizing the musical appreciation of jazz only transfers to the study of African-American music the formalist view that remains debilitatingly dominant in Eurocentric musicology, with its continuing emphasis on internalist music analysis." (89)

Gary Tomlinson. Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies. Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 71-105.

Backing Chinen

Nate Chinen has a humorous (at least to me) column on the "Jazzbro," defined as "a self-styled jazz aficionado, overwhelmingly male and usually a musician in training himself" who demonstrates

a compulsion to signal the awareness of any mildly startling musical detail, with muttered exclamations like the aforementioned "Woooo"; the emphatic adjectival use of the word "killing," as in "that solo was killing"; and the exploitation of jazz knowledge as a private commodity selectively put on public display.

That offense could possibly be taken to this only-half-humorous article merely confirms that the problem is real. Driven by just such a response from some corners, Chinen actually had to clarify that his beef is with "the performative exclamation, the posturing, self-congratulatory yawp," not with genuine expressions of audience enthusiasm. I couldn't agree more.

This kind of writing, in which hyperbole and sarcasm serve an earnest message, is deceptively difficult to pull off gracefully. I sometimes try it here and usually fail. Seriously, though, if you didn't LOL even a little bit upon learning that Jazzbros "ritually converge anytime Chris Potter is in town with his Underground band," I have some pretty serious reservations about you. And if Chinen's emphasis on age and gender understandably gives this piece an edge to those of us who find ourselves doubly implicated, this is in another sense actually an error of understatement: it has seemed to me for several years now that Jazzbroism is slowly spreading beyond its core demographic group of young males to define a broader swath of jazzland, one that, IMHO, is better defined stylistically. The website Nextbop, for example, though I value and commend them for the service they provide, operates squarely within this space in both style and substance.

In high school, when I first got serious about jazz and started going to more jazz camps, I was alternately enthralled with and taken aback by the top hats, banana ties and unruly comportment so self-consciously flaunted by "the jazz kids." My surly temperament, inexperience playing jazz, and background in classical music kept me from ever truly assimilating to this environment, and it was not much later that in pondering the prospects of becoming a teacher myself all of this began to trouble me in earnest. Though much of my own recent jazz work is concert-oriented, there is a time and place for vocal expressions of approval (perhaps even disapproval) even there, and I would agree with the most butthurt in the Jazzbro caucus that we could probably use more of it, not less. The point of Chinen's piece, which I think is equally important, is that disembodied affect is profoundly destructive, equally so to the experience of the music itself and to the social relationships immediately surrounding it.

Brad Mehldau and the Naive Audience

I imagine I'm not alone in having substantially modified my listening activities in recent years to take full advantage of the advent of digital music streaming. I now spend long stretches investigating particular artists or other themes, listening once to everything I can find, taking note of the things I'd like to hear again and returning later to spend quality time with them. At that point, I do in fact purchase my own copies, digitally or otherwise, rather than streaming; the internet still doesn't work everywhere all the time, and who knows if it will ever be allowed to.

"You know that record, right?" Yes and no. I probably listened to that record once and forgot all but the name of it, unless it was killing, but even then, it's probably still dangling in the purgatory of Listmania, waiting its turn to either change my life or frustrate the hell out of me. As many elders have pronounced, the danger of failing to truly absorb anything you've heard is now ever-present for students of music. I would take the present situation a hundred times out of a hundred, though, in exchange for almost never having to plop down $5, $10, $20 worrying that it might not be worth it in any number of ways that records, good or bad, relevant or otherwise, often are not. Thankfully, you no longer have to buy the chair having only been shown the legs; now you actually get to sit down in it and scratch yourself.

Truthfully, I can't in good conscience recommend single audition investigation to younger students or any other new listeners. For years, I had to hear something at least 3 times to begin to form an opinion; I didn't just observe this after the fact, but actually felt it in the moment. My formative years would have been quite a bit less formative had I indulged first impressions the way I do nowadays. It makes sense to me, though, that with experience comes acuity, and indeed, my evaluation is now far less likely to change from the first audition to the second, and almost never from the second to the third. Perhaps this also suggests that the well-documented inflexibility of age is beginning to set in; then again, don't these digital treasure troves of damn-near-everything offer by their very scatterbrained nature a particularly powerful antidote to just that affliction? Without the internet, Gentle Giant, Univers Zero and Lightnin' Hopkins would likely have remained mysteries to me until it was truly too late. It used to cost too much to take shots in the dark on stuff you weren't sure about; were we really better off that way?

I've now gone down the Spotify rabbit hole, but plan to keep my eMusic subscription as well, and so for just a bit more than the cost of a new CD, I get a month of unlimited investigation and future offline access to the cream of that crop. As a professional skeptic, I am so optimistic about all of this that it scares me just a bit. I understand that those afflicted with the scourge of audiophilia are not so optimistic, nor are those who aspire to someday raise 2.5 kids solely on their record sales. For me, however, there's no ethical or practical reason not to jump in with two feet. The "promise of technology" is so often just a capitalist ruse, but for musicians, I think this much of it is real. We had better make good on it, don't you think?

•••••
One of my first lines of inquiry a few years ago was Brad Mehldau. I have never been one to keep up with the latest developments in music, often feeling too bogged down with catching up on what happened before I was born, but the new digital music paradigm has been a great excuse for me to begin to remedy that, especially since artists active today tend to be represented fairly completely in the digital realm, unlike those who released lots of records before such technology became widespread. For his part, Mehldau has been prolific: my survey took weeks to complete, but it painted a vivid picture as a result. After a couple of years, I have just recently returned to the record that came out at the top of the heap based on those single hearings: The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4: Back at the Vanguard from 1999 with Larry Grenadier (bass) and Jorge Rossy (drums).

Repeated listening has clinched landmark status for this record in my mind for many reasons. Mehldau's playing is original and distinctive, identifiable from the first note, and nonetheless drenched in tradition. The live energy on this recording is positively crackling, the band playing exceptionally well as a unit with all three musicians producing incredible sounds on their instruments. The originals are fresh, the standard material is reinvigorated, and the repertoire is enhanced. I'm purposely repeating every jazz cliche I can think of, and I think they all apply here. Stated in such vague terms, however, they apply to many great jazz recordings, not just this one, which is why we are all sick and tired of reading them over and over and feeling as if we have not really learned anything about the material we are researching. Further, detractors will grant a record every one of these points, even the energy part, and remain unmoved aesthetically. That should tell us something.

I am, as I hope I have made clear, hardly a detractor in this case, nor am I, to be sure, suddenly aspiring to critic-hood, but as the greatness of this record began to sink in, some unique explanations presented themselves which I think go beyond the standard critical tropes namechecked above in a much-needed way. Specifically, I think that the dialogue surrounding audience development for jazz and other art musics is a potentially fascinating lens through which to consider the content of this particular record. Such is my primary purpose here.

As a trained musician with loads of technical knowledge and focused listening experience, this music presented me from the opening piano intro a decisive choice between two distinct modes of listening, and it turns out not to be the structural option that affords me a degree of enjoyment and fulfillment commensurate with a "landmark" jazz record, but rather something more moment-to-moment, akin to what is typically ascribed to the hypothetical naive listener. Why is this? On one hand, it is just plain difficult to hear this music structurally because the style of playing makes the songforms really hard to follow. There is, however, a crucial redeeming quality here, namely that these techniques consistently serve the creation of attractive musical surfaces.

Music like this can actually be a more disconcerting experience for the structurally inclined specialist the more familiar the material is, since there is then a proportionally higher degree of expectation to be violated or neglected. The degree of spontaneous displacement, reharmonization, and riffing that takes place, often at breakneck tempos, is severe, making following along a full-time job, even for large stretches of the warhorse standards "All The Things You Are" and "Solar." On the other hand, I still don't know the form to Mehldau's composition "Sehnsucht" and I don't particularly care to; I would have to listen structurally, and in the case of this record, that is usually not as much fun. The specialist is uniquely equipped to make this kind of decision by reading such performances for technical cues as to how they might best be heard. It is hardly in my nature to do this quite so consciously, but as I say, this record seems to demand a firm decision from the get-go in a way I've scarcely experienced before. What, then, about the hypothetical jazz naif around whom the audience development discussion necessarily revolves? Is he or she not by default the ultimate surface-oriented listener? Does he or she get to make a decision?

•••••
The critical dialogue in jazz can, in my opinion, be thrown for quite a loop by the style of playing on this record, which has many contemporary exponents besides Mehldau, and which I would venture does indeed have the potential to polarize reception between initiates and non-initiates to a greater degree than many other jazz styles. Of course, the critical reception of this particular record was scarcely less than glowing; part of my goal here is to unpack why that is and what it means. But I need to clarify what I mean, then, when I claim that this kind of playing is frequently misunderstood.

It is fair to say that the kind of escalated structural deception and rarefied technique on display here is often met with knee-jerk accusations of over-intellectualization and technical overdevelopment. Musicians themselves have many reasons besides taste for leveling such criticisms, but in the case of non-musician critics, I wonder if it is not more significant that such music subverts a dearly held value of the jazz music they know best, namely clarity of structural articulation. I certainly am not writing to plant seeds of ambivalence about structural articulation, to which I once devoted its own outreach-oriented screed. Rather, I want to make the case for understanding The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4 as songform-based jazz where structural articulation is, shockingly, more or less incidental to the listening experience, and which is therefore a prime candidate to connect with listeners whose structural awareness is less than that of the average professional jazz musician.

The most basic lesson here about bugaboos like structural displacement and expansive instrumental technique is that when it all works, no one complains. It sure would be nice to see more analysis from critics as well as musicians that makes constructive suggestions as to how technique might be put to better use in the music under discussion rather than simply declaring how dearly they wish the players' chops had been purposefully stunted. As a model combination of chops and sensitivity, Mehldau should have an important place in such discourse, and those of us who play would do well to learn what we can from him in this way. More germane to the topic at hand, though, I am concerned that musicians and non-musicians only think they are speaking the same language if and when matters of structural articulation and displacement come up for discussion. Most anyone who has not played the music at a high level, whether a professional critic or just an anonymous listener, is reduced to face-value acceptance of futile attempts by musicians to verbalize what they do. Leading questions like "How do you know where you are?" or "How do you all stay together?" are, tellingly, the same questions that young students ask when they lack the grounding and bandwidth to "just play" tunes without getting lost, just all of us once did, possibly for a longer stretch of our lives than we would want to admit to the rare critic who has taken an interest in us.

The teacher, if he is not careful, can sow the same confusion in these students that he sows in critics who ask him these things after a gig if he breaks down and says something like, "You just always have to know where you are in the form of the song," and leaves it at that. As an answer, that is literally 100% true, but it is also highly misleading. The truly inquisitive will follow up with the inevitable, "But you're not really thinking about measures/scales/chords/keys/fingerings, right?" "Right," you say, and send them off more confused than they were before. Or, you just keep digging yourself a deeper semantic hole until you've stopped making sense and they decide to leave you alone.

The ineffability of music is not a new topic of discussion, so forgive me for belaboring the point a bit. The reason I do so here is to highlight the fallacy in reasoning such as this:

Jazz musicians love jazz the most.

Jazz musicians always know where they are in the songform.

Therefore, love of jazz varies directly with the ability to know where you are in the songform.

Jazz songform, unfortunately, is a nuanced, dialectical concept that defies a simple explanation. The diligent student of jazz appreciation following along with "All The Things You Are" is not doing the same thing as the high-level jazz musician "always knowing where they are in the form" throughout a heated performance. In the syllogism above, the musician and the non-musician are, as usual, talking at cross purposes. If we therefore reject equating knowledge gained through high-level participation with that gained from a distance through scholarship but accept the thesis that love of jazz varies proportionately with structural fluency, we thereby resign ourselves to the notion that jazz can only be truly appreciated by people who play it at a high level, since that is the only way to obtain a central skill required to appreciate it. For the reasons I have given, I indeed believe that we equate those two types of knowledge at our own peril, but I also believe that according such centrality to structural concerns is a mistake, and therefore that this conclusion, thankfully, is incorrect.

Consider, if you were not already aware, that there are circles of jazz musicians working today, peers of Mehldau's in age if not always in stature, who take structural obfuscation and displacement on standard material to absurd lengths, far beyond what takes place on this record. As a nominal fellow professional, I will refrain from naming names, but I don't doubt some readers will know just who I'm thinking of, and if they have people in mind I've never heard of, better yet. I have alternately tried listening to this music in each of the two modes I referenced at the outset, that is structurally and non-structurally. I found neither appealing. Displacement does not always create an attractive surface, and it also makes the alternative of structural listening difficult and unpleasant. I have had a foot in gnarlier music than this my whole adult life and this music appeals to neither my head nor my heart. I am secure in dismissing it.

Mehldau has never been so easily dismissible on these grounds, and for better or worse doesn't seem likely to put himself in danger of it from hereon out. This may actually be one of his least accessible records, one which, even if it goes down as his best, as I think it could, will never be recommended as a starting point for students investigating his work for the first time. Even so, accessibility has always been one of Mehldau's defining qualities, and without getting on too sharp a razor's edge about what the word itself might mean, I would posit that no one has ever made more accessible jazz music with such a healthy disregard for traditional structural articulation, and yet without ever begging the question of why form was not abandoned from the outset. Donning my critic's hat for just a moment, I contend that this is a staggering achievement that deserves to be part of this music's enduring legacy. That is to say that if this record is remembered first and foremost for "deconstructing" or "messing with" standard songforms because the non-musician critics drank the structural listening kool-aid and the musicians had their fingers too far up their noses to be able to break the rest of this down for them, I will turn in my grave. (I'll double-time it if it is remembered first and foremost for covering Radiohead, though after checking out some other versions of "Exit Music," including the original, I can't say I'm not impressed with how much Mehldau manages to squeeze out of it.)

Songforms shape the surface qualities of this music profoundly, but they do so from an immeasurably greater distance than textbook jazz appreciation is accustomed to dealing with, and that is to say that the clarity or obfuscation of the underlying songform is irrelevant when the work's defining feature is its surface. This music demands to be heard moment-to-moment and in that sense is made for the naive listener as well as for the specialist. That is not to say by any means that any particular naive listener is guaranteed to like what they hear on that surface (witness this lonely and inadvertently hysterical Amazon review), but it is right there for them to judge, served up with a loving transparency that would make Kyle Gann blush. We do violence to the voices of naive jazz listeners and to the larger dialogue about audience development in jazz, if we indeed want to have one, by insisting on a structural hearing where none is necessary. Similarly, sending grant-funded troupes of mediocre local heroes and underdeveloped college jazz majors out to perform in acoustically disastrous spaces isn't going to win jazz very many new fans, but presenting music like this could. First, though, we must give some thought to how to spot it among the mayhem of the burgeoning digital archive.

•••••
I am tempted in spite of my formalist tendencies to argue that the defining feature of every work of music is its surface, but you don't have to be willing to go that far to be led to question the need for listeners to hang on every structural landmark. I have to think Mehldau would agree: in his notes to Sam Yahel's album Truth and Beauty, remarking on the band's ability to "[make] an unconventional meter sound natural and fluid," he adds that "It only becomes tricky when you try to count it!" And now we are back to cliches about jazz, but this one, I insist, is crucially important, for only in taking just such a step back from The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4 is the true depth of Mehldau's contribution revealed.

It is true that "surface" and "depth" are concepts which often cohabit plenty of slippery ground, but I am nonetheless content that this language helps immensely in communicating the essence of how I hear this music and how I suspect it is most readily underappreciated, if only relatively so. Such it is that exalting the "surface" could be taken to imply the charge of superficiality. I would not go quite that far. I have already called this record a "landmark," which I stand by, but hand to heart, I cannot bring myself to see it in the very top echelon for precisely this reason. It is unusually intricate surface-oriented music achieved by means of frighteningly intricate but inessential deeper structures. It is not music where I notice something shockingly new every time I listen, one of those faux-intellectual litmus tests of musical profundity, but one which throughout my journey I've only become more perversely inclined to accept. And of course, returning to questions of methods, it now occurs to me to ask whether this is not precisely the kind of music that the listen-bookmark-return method is destined to privilege over every other kind. It's hard to imagine this dynamic doesn't exist at all; only time will tell, I suppose, if it proves a hinderance.

It must be borne in mind that surfaces are not by definition "accessible" in the abstract, though we might say that they are by definition more accessible than whatever it is that constitutes the corresponding depth. Bach's most densely populated fugues, for example, could legitimately be said to present a simpler underlying structure but far more daunting surface than Ligeti's Lontano. Dealing in thousands upon thousands of tiny grains of time and pitch right at the threshold of perceptual recognition allows Ligeti to construct larger units with shockingly simple-sounding, blurred surfaces; Bach's voices are, meanwhile, coarser grains with fiercer independence, thus running up against a wholly different set of perceptual limitations.

I was, in fact, reminded of both of these composers during the imitative passage between the left and right hands in "Solar." (I trust that those who "know" the record will follow my references and those who don't probably won't want to be bothered with listening to it right this second. And if they do want to be bothered with it, they should listen to the whole thing!) The contrapuntal technique here is somewhere between Bach and Ligeti, not exactly a true blur but nonetheless similarly disorienting in the context of a swingin' jazz piano solo, and yet lent ample clarity by the space between the voices and Mehldau's stunning independence. Does this snippet make this a "great" solo? Like most of them on this record, it is a solo that takes a moment to get going and doesn't always seem to develop in an ideally straight line. And yet there are extraordinary moments that leave you breathless, moments which wouldn't be nearly so powerful if they were more numerous and happened in the "right" order. I'm not sure the power of a more terse, sculpted solo could rival this one's cumulative impact.

Two other breathless spots in "Solar," once it gets cracking: the F blues romp that emerges out of the contrapuntal section referenced above, and shortly thereafter, the snatch of unison that materializes between the two hands in middle of a driving bebop line. (Sure, I'm being lazy about references again, but if you "know" the record and can't recall these, do you "know" the record? And if you don't "know" the record and have read this far anyway, are you really going to cue it up just for me and my stupid blog?) Mehldau's writing reveals a near-obsession with issues of irony and sincerity, and it is a credit to him that all three of these gestures are deathly serious, not to mention utterly shocking (in the best way) the first time you hear them. A credit due, this time, to the listen-bookmark-return method in that given enough intervening time you get to hear these moments for the first time twice.

It stands to reason that just how shocking they remain to new listeners of the future will directly impact the long-term critical standing of this music. Beethoven specialists eventually started sounding like idiots to just about everyone else when they continued building their interpretations on the supposed shock value of starting a piece on a secondary dominant or introducing a non-functional flatted seventh over the tonic triad. There are better explanations for that music's staying power. In the postmodern era, even such purely contextual shock is in danger of ceasing to be possible, but from my necessarily limited vantage point, it is a defining feature of this record nonetheless, which is precisely why the record, as great as I think it is, doesn't grow on me the way other music that is otherwise equally great often does.

That is to say that with each hearing the shocking parts lose their luster a bit. You cannot hear them the way they demand to be heard if you know they are coming. The first note of the out head on "All The Things," stated with a directness, metrically and otherwise, that hasn't yet been heard at this late stage of the tune, is stunning the first time and too obvious after that. The suspended alternating-hands figure in the piano that is high point of the "London Blues" solo (you know, where the knucklehead in the crowd starts shouting) is so exciting that at first you don't even notice that the last chorus of it starts with a comically plain C7 sound. Once you start to hear through the odd voicing, this becomes a disappointing resolution to one of the swingingest passages on the record. And the angular non-sequitur lick in "Nice Pass" only truly works as intended (that is, I have to think, unironically) when it is unfamiliar enough as to seem that the band really did collectively decide to stop on a dime in the 29th bar of Rhythm Changes and go all Cecil Taylor on it. Additional hearings of this epic performance inevitably confirm that the selfsame lick ends the tune, which colors its first appearance tremendously and outs all of this as the one ironic lapse on the record. (And really, wouldn't it just happen to be at the expense of the avant-garde?)

If anyone reading this hasn't heard this music and is inspired to check it out, I fear that I've now ruined it for you once and for all. Similarly, if I could shout through a computer screen, I would shout at the people in charge of musical outreach programs of all types: STOP PREPARING YOUR AUDIENCE!!! The truly profound in music tends to endure quite a bit more sturdily in the face of such tampering but does not offer up its secrets quite so readily. Hence, that this is decidedly music-for-the-moment should not detract from its greatness, especially not in jazz, which of course has always been moment music of a sort. As great as I think this album is based on my initial reactions, and as important as that stance implies I am willing to take initial reactions to be, I find surprisingly little here that threatens to grow on me in that "timeless" way. By speaking so directly, though, it just might speak to the naif in ways the specialist wouldn't normally anticipate. It's likely that anyone serious enough about music to be evangelizing for it has been shaped disproportionately by music of great depth which may not be a reliable hook for newbs, but I would hope it is also clear that mediocrity isn't going to hook anyone either. What is needed for this purpose is great surface-oriented music that lives in the moment. I for one will be looking to this record as a model.

Exit Strategies III: Documentation

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

•••••
from The "H" Series :

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

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

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

from Five Movements for Clarinet, Viola and Piano

Second Movement
listen (MP3)

Third Movement
listen (MP3)

view full score
(PDF)

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

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

Whack Stack of Mister's Sly

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



The "H" Series: H-9

Stefan Kac Quintet
(personnel as above)

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

Postlude

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

from Series 0:

0-1

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

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

...for a city of its size...

City of Minneapolis inspectors evidently have claimed another casualty, this time the Riverview Cafe and Wine Bar, a lovely establishment right in my old neighborhood with which former compadres Matt Peterson and David Alderson, among others, have had long-standing associations. Find more info, including how to help, here. I left the following comment:

Some conjecture from a (willfully) displaced Minneapolitan:

Has anyone reached out to the "neighbors?" In my experience (i.e. the first 28 years of my life), the "neighbors" (too kind a euphemism, frankly) have a way of precipitating city involvement in these sorts of matters. I lived in this neighborhood for 4 years; it's a lovely place and a demographic checkerboard. And it totally has "neighbors." I moved there specifically so I could take the light rail to work and promptly found my car chalked like clockwork every three days if I did not drive it.

Fifteen years is too long for something to be going on without someone at the city knowing about it. We have been down this road before in recent years with the 331 Bar and Tillie's Bean In the former case, according to the given article, "The city's concern is that it needs to regulate businesses impact on their communities (ie noise, traffic etc)." Though the provenance of that interpretation is unclear in the article, it certainly suggests "neighborly" involvement if accurate. Tillie's Bean, meanwhile, merely experienced a "routine inspection," that is, "after nearly three years in business." Hmm...

These events were not "big news," but they were talked about, not just in musicians' circles, and received not-insignificant media coverage, as the linked articles attest. Concurrently, a city councilperson's proposal to regulate music by type (i.e. genre) also fell flat, but gave away the degree of obliviousness at work, some suggested to the Constitution no less than to the culture of the city! I would be shocked if a sizable proportion of relevant city officials at any/all levels were completely unaware of how all of this makes them look. However, anyone who has lived in Minneapolis for any period of time knows that these officials ultimately serve the "neighbors," and truthfully, that's because the "neighbors" are vocal and involved and the rest of us, I say as equanimously as I can, generally are not. As a musician, I have always worried that there were more pressing social issues for me to be "involved" in than my own musical self-interest, but it's possible that we're seeing something here which does have larger implications. What do you think?

It is, of course, plausible that no residents of any of these neighborhoods have had anything to do with bringing such "violations" to the city's attention and/or demanding action. But if that is the case, then my recommendation to get in touch with them goes double. Get a few musicians together this weekend to door-knock 42nd Ave. between 37th and 39th streets and see what people say. Perhaps also consider contacting the managers/proprietors of the other businesses at 38th and 42nd. If these "neighbors" are sympathetic, use them; the city WILL listen. If they are evasive and irritated, then at least you've confirmed what's going on.

Easy for me to call others to action, since I've fled to Los Angeles, where the music scene stretches beyond the horizon, and where the "neighbors" in Eagle Rock are busy opposing a new bike lane. Maybe this is my cue to get "involved" in that.

In spirit,

-SK

Exit Strategies II: The Two Dignities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exit Strategies I: Sobriety

Being a musician is not my "dream." My "dream" was to be a professional baseball player, something farfetched enough, in my case at least, to become an obsession, and gun-to-my-head, I'd still rather be chasing it if I could. My relationship to music is rather different, but not simply because I showed infinitely greater natural ability (whatever we're currently agreeing or not agreeing that means) from a much earlier stage. Music was a significant part of my early childhood, though I resisted active participation until adolescence; the majority of blood relatives I have known in the flesh were or are accomplished amateur musicians; there was a mystical sense of rightness in my earliest experiences with the euphonium which I remember vividly despite at that time not yet possessing a vocabulary flowery enough to fully describe it; I had been obsessed as a child with acquiring paper and notebooks, writing page-long stories about my cats whenever my elementary school teachers would accept them as substitutes for those miserable "reading book" assignments, and once I found music, it became an even more fluent outlet for these creative urges, leading to the composition of about 120 short pieces from 7th through 12th grade.

Much of this does not particularly distinguish me from many of my peers, though some of it does. What I feel more acutely than anything as I sit here today, however, having just made it out of CalArts at the age of 30 with most but not all of my dignity intact is the dissonance between the rhetoric of "chasing your dreams" or "doing what you love" with which young artists are so often bombarded and that of my actual personal history, worldview and posture. The musician in me has goals, not dreams, and at the risk of committing middle-aged revisionism against my younger days, I would say that this has largely always been the case. Ecstasy is the domain of the sudden, the unexpected, the farfetched; it's what I would have felt if I had ever been offered a college scholarship to play baseball, been drafted by a major league organization, signed a professional contract, and so on. My musical journey has not of course been entirely devoid of ecstatic moments, but I can count them on one hand. Conversely, the moments along the way where I figured out, in part, what I really should be doing with myself have been overwhelmingly matter-of-fact ones, marked by a distinctive calming sensation, and too numerous to recall in sum.

I am not a spiritual person and therefore am avoiding speaking here of what I or anyone else was "meant" to do by some omniscient deity or the alignment of the planets. I don't think it's a stretch, however, to posit that in a more pragmatic, rational, earthly sense, those factors which have shaped us from birth yet lie beyond our control taken together with the general condition of the world we find ourselves inheriting (once we become aware of it, and once we have taken control of ourselves) can certainly clarify the picture for us substantially when it comes to deciding how to pass the time. In a 100% fair and just world, I would not be a professional musician or athlete, but rather a scientist. Given my family background, academic predilections, innate abilities, and general social considerations of long-term stability and respectability, a 100% fair and just world would have nurtured my stated desire to do science rather than throwing it back in my face at every turn. Perhaps in that 100% fair and just world, I would be "meant" to do science. In the real world, however, despite the many frustrations of a career in music and the poor manner in which my experiences as an aspiring scientist reflect upon the institutions I attended, I have trouble convincing myself that I was actually "meant" to do science and not music.

It feels good to have found my lane, but not good enough to throw a party. Parties are reserved for the momentous and the unexpected; for reaching landmarks, not for just existing; for the fulfillment of dreams, not goals. We "dream" of building houses on hills, sailing around the world, winning the lottery, witnessing the turn of a millennium, meeting Kim Kardashian, and other asinine preoccupations that would (and do) destroy us if our obsession with them becomes normalized. Only in vocations widely thought to be privileges in comparison to the life of the average working stiff do we find such a high incidence of recreational self-celebration verging on narcissism: art, sports, politics, and so on. This tells us something about privilege, but it tells us even more clearly and importantly that the bulk of these individuals are living their dreams, not their goals; that talent and happenstance aside, they were not truly "meant" to be artists or athletes or politicians; that if they were, they would comport themselves with a far higher degree of modesty and class.

I did not attend my graduation from the University of Minnesota, and I hid, quite literally, in my room for nearly a whole day last year to avoid the CalArts graduation festivities as they unfolded not far from my door. I did attend this year, however, which brought all of this home to me in a big way. I have been struggling ever since to put into words everything that I sensed and felt throughout that evening. What you've just read is part of it, and there's still more, which is liable to take me several more paragraphs, perhaps posts, to exhaust. A relative said I looked embarrassed, which was precisely correct even though I hadn't initially thought to put it that way. People who know me are laughing as they read this, thinking it's just the standard-issue curmudgeonly diatribe from the guy who would rather hole up with the complete Lutoslawski and a bottle of wine than go have a beer with the guys. I do, admittedly, have a strong aversion to pisserfest clusterfucks involving any but my very most favorite people in the world, but that is beside the point here. The point, rather, is that as graduate after graduate traipsed across that stage in their Halloween costumes, accompanied by their favorite nine seconds of music, in many cases acting out rehearsed gestures and/or jumping on the mic for quasi-forbidden shoutouts, I simply could not convince myself that I was watching people who had found their lanes. This has nothing to do with the fact that I generally don't like parties and everything to do with a bunch of spoiled brats throwing a party for themselves without in many cases having yet entered the phases of their lives when "dreams" and "goals" as I have called them have become discernible from each other.

To be sure, not everyone at CalArts is a spoiled brat, some degrees granted there mean more than others in their respective fields, and there are lots of students there, undergrads as well as grads, who have indeed been out in the working world for some stretch of time or other. The rest of y'all might do well to take a cue from a professional athlete named David West and act like you've been there before. When I wrote in the previous post of "how destructive the ongoing excessive romanticization of the arts remains to the arts themselves," I was trying to point to an issue which is at its heart a decisively economic and political one and not merely a cultural or social one as it might appear on the surface. It is remarked upon often what a privilege it is to have a career in the arts when judged against the backdrop of the things that most other people do for a living simply because most other people are profoundly unhappy doing those things for the amount of time their jobs require it of them, or at least a lot less happy than the average professional artist or athlete or politician, or so the logic goes. At this point you will of course recognize this as the rhetoric of "dreams," of our culture's obsession with having it better than your neighbor, of winning the meritocracy, of defining art (socially!) by negation rather than by affirmation, which is not to say that I am oblivious to any sense of my own privilege in having had the opportunity to become an artist, just that there is an important difference between hope and fear to which artists (of all people) ought to be particularly finely attuned. And while I have known very few truly malcontent professional artists, I do sense fear at nearly every turn in the professional world: fear of poverty, of day jobs, of failure to keep up appearances and the ubiquitous threat of silent judgment by parents and peers, a brand of fear which, by my sensibilities at least, is rather inherently destructive to the artistic impulse even if it seems to live in the realm of "real life."

Superfluous, perhaps, to point out that Western musicians before Beethoven and Liszt were closer to working stiffs in both cultural and material terms, but it's interesting to consider. It seems counterintuitive but is in fact the case that romanticism was deeply concerned with what today we call "outreach" but not at all with "plurality:" high art was to be shared with all, but there was a way to listen, to play, to write; the people were not to beat the aristocracy but rather to join them. The final deconstruction of taste, valuation, essentialism, innateness, etc. only came much later, intended to make art, in the West the ultimate privilege for centuries, into a human right; and yet art has only became more of a privilege as this relativization of reception fragmented the market right along with culture itself. Ironically, one can scarcely imagine there's another place on Earth which has devoted so much real and imagined effort toward such deconstruction, relativization and utopian egalitarianism than CalArts, and yet the comportment of the students there (and this extends far beyond the graduation party) has all the rhetoric of the petit bourgeois masquerading as aristocrat, of new money on parade without knowing quite how to behave itself.

For the record, I am all for art as a right, at least in theory, but I recognize that this cannot happen until it ceases to be ecstatic and once again becomes workaday. What I mean of course is not that the experience of art must cease to be ecstatic, but rather that the posture of its creators within the context of their society must break with the rhetoric of privilege. The question of whether this is either possible or desirable is not one I feel up to tackling right this minute. What I am ready to do is to leave the pretension of "dreams" behind in the CalArts bubble.

The Social Network as Anti-Aesthetic

It is in one sense quite odd to me, and in another not at all, that the prescription for musicians to make friends with their audience tends to go unremarked upon from a critical perspective. It wasn't that long ago that the composerly world was rocked, riven, scandalized, some would say self-imploded by the suggestion that writing music only for other specialists was a good idea. I myself have never thought it was a particularly good idea, but I will tell you why a Babbitt-ian audience comprised exclusively of colleagues appeals to me more than one comprised exclusively of friends. (They are both, it bears mentioning, social networks, which points to the absurdity of privileging one so decisively over the other.)

The socially networked audience theory takes the hackneyed pop-cultural adage that true friends are the ones who tell you the truth even when it hurts and turns it on its head. Instead, you now must make friends with as many potential listeners as possible in order to insulate yourself from judgment, since your friends will never tell you what they really think of your music as long as your show makes for a good hang. But of course these must be your true friends, since they make time to come to your shows, hence allowing you to have a career, perhaps even to make a living.

I see this dynamic as the dark matter lurking unseen behind the more visible movement, especially within the contemporary art world, towards post/anti-aesthetic art. Musicians, especially the kind most inclined toward what I am calling the socially networked audience theory, seem to me to be as a group still very much interested in aesthetics, at least as far as how their work is made. Music being "the social art," as some have called it, our "anti-aesthetic" takes hold in the public presentation of our work instead of (perhaps despite) its mode of conception.

There is also a distinctly meritocractic tinge to all of this. (And make no mistake, meritocracy is a whole category of anti-aesthetic unto itself.) Whereas the opportunity to become an aesthetic success has historically been tied to privilege (leisure time for taking up music and the money to pay for instruments and instruction), it seems more in keeping with good American values that the people with the most friends should have the privilege of making art for a living, since this would suggest that they are far more legitimately meritorious than those who had the good fortune of being born into money, and perhaps even more so than those who fought their way into music without the benefits of privilege, since a lot of those people, though we respect the heck out of them for their dedication, are jerks nonetheless.

“Overdetermination,” says the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, "comes closer to its postmodern connotation when Althusser, a Marxist philosopher, borrows the term to describe the complex whole of a social formation as it is constituted by a multiplicity of determining contradictions." Sorry for going there, Modernists, but doesn't that describe the socially networked audience theory pretty well? In a closed musical culture with a high degree of aesthetic consensus, friends and family hardly count for an audience any more than they do for references on a job application. Conversely, in a fragmented, postmodern musical culture where one has the freedom to make and consume any of a number of different kinds of music, they do not merely become the core of one's audience by default, but in fact (and this is where you can practically smell the overdetermination) they are vociferously annointed as the necessary core of one's audience by the most prominent tastemakers and cultural theorists in the musical profession itself, the only explanation being "The world has changed! Don't be left behind!"

There is a too-obvious, if not entirely incorrect, interpretation to be made here, namely that as times have gotten tougher for musicians, we have merely stooped lower and lower just to get by, and that only once the downturn had touched everyone more or less equally (even the fat cats) did it become socially acceptable to avowedly rely on friends and family for an audience, and indeed to advocate openly for doing so from positions of respect and/or authority. If that were the whole story, however, I believe we would nonetheless detect no small amount of regret in these proclamations, and also that it would be malcontents like me more so than those occupying said "positions of respect and/or authority" who would be glumly relating our plight to an imaginary readership. What in fact we have are commentators in high places who, to the extent it is possible to ascertain as much through a written medium, can barely contain their glee.

Many (myself occasionally included) have lamented the low standing of the arts in contemporary American society. And yet the present discussion makes clear how destructive the ongoing excessive romanticization of the arts remains to the arts themselves. It is this romanticization which provides the elusive other half of the primary "determining contradiction" in the social pathway to a post/anti-aesthetic. Or, in plain English, we recognize that art is in one sense a right and in another a privilege. The socially networked audience theory is one futile attempt among many to square these two realizations with each other when in fact both are permanent and irreconcilable, a good old fashioned dialectic which the postmodern revolution only thinks it has resolved.

When We Listen To How Much of What, and Why

"...but would you rather listen to Bach or Vivaldi after a long day at work?"

Um...is this a trick question?

My name is Stefan and I have a problem. I listen the most to the music that is most important to me. Parties are not welcome respites from talking about music, but in fact welcome opportunities to talk about the music I really want to talk about. I've been known to "chill" at the end of a long day with my friends Shostakovich and Lutoslawski. Like everyone else, when I have leisure time, I do what I want; unlike everyone else, what I want to do most of the time is hear/read/write/contemplate that which gives my life purpose.

I'm struck by some recent comments and events here at school implying that there's something wrong or unusual about this. It's not the first time, but it still gets under my skin. If you almost never listen to a style of music, it is not "important" to you, no matter what you say. If certain "heavy" composers are set aside only for special occasions and rare states of consciousness, those are not your favorite composers, no matter what you say. The music that is important to you is your daily nourishment, not a delicacy to be ascetically reserved for special occasions. The things in life that are important to you are the things you confide in your friends, not those which you hide from them for fear of coming off a square. (Or are they your friends after all?)

Everyone needs a break. Even I retreat to the basketball court or the Scrabble board from time to time. Maybe it'd be nice if the rest of y'all that I have to live and work with didn't look quite so eager to get away? Maybe just humor that guy at the party who won't leave music behind when he leaves campus? Be yourself, of course, but dare I say maybe don't be quite so openly proud for not being like that guy if you really think this is what you want to do with your life?

How peculiar this all looks to someone of my sensibilities, accustomed as I am to being bludgeoned over the head with the insistence that art and life must be joined at the hip; that Art without Culture is just gymnastics; that "making pretty things" for their own sake is merely an adolescent phase; that the most important thing about art is its social message; that beauty and craft are merely Trojan Horses, used by elitist ideologues to seduce, hypnotize and disenfranchise the common folk; that silly white musicians err in treating their sound as an external "artifact" where they might more properly seek a "voice"; that music "matters" because it makes kids smart; in other words, that autonomous art is degenerate art, specifically because "autonomy" means severing the work from all of the things which make it "relevant" (if not always "beautiful," which is of course is strictly optional).

Having thus shoehorned Art into Life, Life does the Dosey Do! What a drag! Of course you don't talk about anti-aesthetic art any more than you have to! Of course you need a break from it twice a day! Of course you put on something else when your friends are over! You made it to be life, but not your life! You made it to teach society a lesson you were born knowing! Let them sort out your dogpile while you enjoy your teeny-bop techno music and totally epic wall hangings! Real life is, like, totally important to who you are as an artist, but it's not like anyone is going to live it all the time!

One of my favorite ambiguous statements is one I first heard uttered earnestly: "The only reason to do music for a living is that you can't do anything else." I ask any musician reading this to stop for a moment and consider which, if either, sense of this statement applies to you.

Occupy Wall Street The Tens Place

Scroll to the bottom of this page for tangible, real-world utilitarian proof that post-tonal theory should be more widely taught and understood.

More is more (and not just of what it is of)

Upon running into a non-musician CalArtian friend before a concert and learning that she is attending in order to hear the work of a musician she has agreed to collaborate with, the following exchange ensued:

SK: So it's an interdisciplinary thing?

FRIEND: No, I'm not asking for funding.