Towards "A Full Understanding"

Jazz and race. It's a topic that's been making it's way around the blogosphere lately. By the time I get this post up, the whole thing probably will have passed over. Fine. This isn't something that one just rattles off a casual sketch about. It deserves a well thought-out, carefully worded, conscientious effort even from a blog, the most notoriously casual and unregulated of all media outlets. I'd undoubtedly have less to talk about here (which would be a good thing) if more people had put more thought and more effort into what they've written. Here, then, are my responses to the good, the bad and the ugly of what has been said recently. My sincere thanks and congratulations to anyone who actually reads the whole thing.

This is undoubtedly the touchiest subject to fall within the purview of this blog (sorry guys, B-flat versus C tubas doesn't even register on the scale). With that in mind, let me establish a few things from the outset that the reader may want to keep in mind while evaluating my comments. This is a classic example of a situation where everyone wants to be the victim. Needless to say, African Americans as a group have endured victimization the likes of which few other Americans can relate to directly, both in general, and specifically with regard to the exploitation of certain largely African American musical contributions and innovations. I get that. This particular situation proves that we are all victims of what has been perpetrated, albeit to varying degrees. It is understandable that some amount of the animosity and distrust created by these injustices endures in succeeding generations of musicians who, individually, have not really done anything to each other.

I am white: to say that I too feel victimized is simply for me to be honest, but could also be interpreted as ignorant. Hence, I need the reader to realize that I by no means consider my own victimization to be on par with the ongoing oppression and exploitation of blacks. It is too easy for whites to come across as insensitive on this matter, and also too easy for blacks to take it this way when it may not have been meant as such. Please do not take anything I say here as an indication of a lack of empathy or historical knowledge (there will be more on my background later). I am acutely aware of the existence and the fallacies of the "cult of white victimhood" (Twin Citeans may recognize that phrase; I'm stealing it from this disturbing City Pages article of last year, which has nothing to do with music, but which many readers will find interesting nonetheless). I do not subscribe to this school of thought; it is a propaganda victory of the right wing designed to whip up racial tensions ("divide and conquer"). My victimization pales in comparison to the real issues here, but I am a victim nonetheless and I insist on the right to voice my concerns. I will do so by taking various recent online statements as starting points and working out from there. At the conclusion of each discussion, I will afford each of these people the opportunity to cover their asses by giving an assignment to each of them based on the claims made in their statements. These people (and anyone else) are thusly invited to post their completed assignments as comments to this entry. Without further ado:

EXHIBIT A
excerpt:
White folks know the historical value of jazz as an art form. They will stop at nothing to write themselves a part of it. But their presence means the scarce resources are taken from the black artists who are the true keepers of the legacy. White males will recognize the dead and dying ones, but never anoint the younger turks like James Carter and Christian McBride. Of course , we shouldn't expect them to. They had always looked out first for their own.

--

The best thing white musicians can do is get out of the way and let them play. Let them be heard, let them be able to sustain a living and leave a legacy. I am still searching for a true white jazz musician. And I have heard many. I hear intellect, but not "soul" and energy. Maybe one day , I will hear one. In the meantime, I refuse to lower the standards I was taught so that they can pretend they have a right to our legacy. Do you think they would accept a black man playing Irish or Yiddish music?

A gem of ethnomusicological scholarship, if I don't say so myself. I have faith that the black supremacist account of jazz history is espoused by a relatively small number of individuals, so small in fact that I'm not sure I've ever met one of these people in person. If I have, they have all been unusually kind to me. Nonetheless, as this document proves, they are out there somewhere, and even if they only express their "real" views in private, anonymously or through one-way online conduits, those views are communicated often enough that this is by no means a dead issue. As the bumper sticker says, if what I'm about to say makes you feel attacked, it is probably a counter-attack.

Dropping McBride's name the way he does is ridiculous. I don't know anyone I've ever worked with, black or white, who wouldn't give up their first born child for McBride's ability. Carter I'm not so sure about, but I hardly find him to be a good example of a musician who has been systematically denied media attention. More like the other way around.

The intellect/soul dichotomy and its many variants should be familiar to anyone who reads about music regularly. It's a bad enough to dismiss a whole slew of musicians (including at least a few widely acknowledged masters) as worthless based entirely on the color of their skin, but to do so on this hopelessly subjective and cliched basis is laughable. Would I accept a black man playing Irish music? Of course. No less than I would accept a black man playing classical music, which many do quite well. How do you explain that?

Assignment for Greg: write a five paragraph essay on the music of one or more of the following white musicians, explaining in specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms why those in question are not worthy of being called jazz musicians.
(1) Bill Evans
(2) Dave Holland
(3) Pat Martino

EXHIBIT B
excerpt:
Whether or not there are authentic systems in [Dave] Douglas’s music is not even close to the point. To me, the question is: What is jazz music? What I really don't like is how the avant-garde, which is more like contemporary European music, is treated as the solution to jazz to the exclusion of real jazz. I realized the problem years ago when Roland Kirk complained to Cecil Taylor in Downbeat that Cecil wouldn't let him sit in with his band. Cecil said they had arrangements, and that's why he didn't let Kirk sit it, but that's not a good reason. That's what holds the music back. It is a real problem that there is no agreed-upon place for avant-garde musicians and the musicians who play real jazz to play together. Because if the avant-garde musicians stay away from the jazz musicians, their music gets to the point where it has less and less to do with jazz. I don't like that.
-Stanley Crouch

The first thing jump out at me about Crouch's statement is a perverse concern with defining jazz, a position which the reader must acknowledge in order to evaluate everything he says during the interview. His approach is notable (but not unique) in the way it aspires to neutrality in order to conceal a value judgement (which, make no bones about it, he wants you to share). Douglas is not a bad musician, he's just not playing jazz, or at least not "real jazz." Sounds objective enough, but let's consider the source: coming from someone who takes stylistic labels for granted, perhaps it could be taken as a neutral statement; coming from Stanley Crouch, it is a veiled condemnation. His statement quoted earlier in the article that "Douglas is not a bad musician" now seems suspiciously candy-coated. Of course, he's entitled to his opinion; from reading the whole interview, I would expect that the two of us most likely share many tastes in music. I simply find the elevation of the "what is jazz?" question to be a bit misguided in general, and given what we know about him, I don't think it is one bit unreasonable to wonder if this is really just about music.

Of course, at this point in the interview, he makes it clear enough that he is expressing opinions rather than facts, but these are opinions about sociology, not music. He doesn't like the avant-garde because arrangements make participation in music-making more exclusive? What about the musical results? I don't think it's too extreme to insist that the musical outcome of any given event is far more significant in any evaluation of it's overall success than the logistics of how inclusive the event is, yet Crouch attempts no such evaluation here, not even on a subjective basis. Hence, not only has he elevated the all-trivial question of stylistic definition to the height of concern, but he answers the question not by evaluating musical properties but by wallowing in social concerns.

On top of all of this, it's ludicrous that he assails the avant-garde for being exclusive. As if any old dope could have simply sat in with Charlie Parker! The stories I've heard about people trying didn't have particularly happy endings. A rift between the mainstream and the avant-garde is an inevitable consequence of a virile art form, and in most cases, I'm not sure members of the two groups are terribly disappointed that they cannot play together. Kirk was not exactly a mainstream guy himself after all, and as petty a thing as it is to say, I feel obligated to point out the obvious fact that he was also blind. Could that have had something to do with it? I've sat in with groups playing original material even though that meant I had to read. I'm having someone do the same with one of my groups tonight. The solution is not to do away with arrangements, but to be a competent sight-reader, which most jazz musicians are anyway these days. Of course, the dixieland guys also think that arrangements are wrong-headed, but Crouch's own stated interests would seem to reach far beyond that. Last I checked, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra plays "arrangements." Does that fact by itself "hold the music back?" Wait...don't answer that.

Another grave mistake is to lump the entire avant-garde together. "Free" music most certainly does not use arrangements. It is nothing less than the single most inclusive Western musical form yet devised. Yes, it tolerates charlatans to a greater extent than most musical traditions as a consequence of this openness, but it also enables what are to me some of the most compelling possibilities anywhere in all of art. Any idiot can see that Crouch's ideal of "real jazz" is far more exclusive than this.

Assignment for Stanley:Write a five paragraph essay defining jazz. Use specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms.

"EXHIBIT C
excerpt:
"Defining 'who can play' is subject to a great deal of cultural bias that breaks down largely along racial lines. Of course, to suggest that the criteria for evaluating the music should emanate from the culture that spawned the music would be interpreted as 'reverse racism."
-Eric Gould

Which culture would that be? Perhaps the culture of New Orleans, which was more thoroughly integrated in the late 1800's than some American cities are today? I think you could argue that race became a larger factor in jazz only after it moved on to places where race was a larger factor in general, but that is a superfluous observation to make here. What Gould is saying implies ownership, and that is more worth examining in depth. Outsiders are being asked to take on a false consciousness and assimilate the value judgments of what is assumed to be a largely foreign culture in exchange for membership in the "jazz" club. Even if you find this reasonable, it certainly isn't very nice. Perhaps the reason you seldom hear such things these days from Europeans talking about their classical tradition is because they have not suffered exploitation like American blacks have. At some point, you'll just have to take my word that I aim to be as sensitive to these issues as any outsider can be without actually having been in the victim's shoes. I still do not think that it helps matters to militantly guard a culture's artistic contributions from all outsiders as if it were a trade secret. It would, in fact, be a tremendous gesture of goodwill and reconciliation to be open to many interpretations of what jazz might mean to people of diverse backgrounds, and in fact, that view is not altogether unusual these days. Some will inevitably reply that the ongoing possibility of exploitation precludes this, a view which I find unduly conservative, but which I suppose I can't disagree with entirely. But just to be clear, if this is indeed the way we're operating these days, I hereby grant permission to all non-whites to play classical music, and to synthesize new musical works from this and other streams of tradition. You can bet your life that I would be labeled a racist if I opined to the contrary.

In any case, here's your assignment, Eric:
Write a five paragraph essay detailing the criteria for evaluation that you think should be used to decide who can play. Use specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms.

EXHIBIT D
excerpt:
The reason most of the whites & asians come out and support is because they're still trying to cop what we're doin'...especially the creative music, because they don't have a full understanding which propels them. Blacks in some since have moved on like Miles and on to tha next.
-http://www.myspace.com/coreywilkes

Aargh. This takes the cake. Let's again reason by analogy to European classical music: when was the last time a white classical pianist gave a recital for a predominantly Korean audience and subsequently complained that there were too few white men in the audience and that the only reason it was packed with young Korean women is that they were there to cop his phrasing? I would hope that this a strictly hypothetical situation, and that if it's not, plenty of people would be lining up to speak out against such an attitude. I can only speak for one white person (myself), but that's not why I go the hear live music. I mean, it's just so much easier to cop that shit from records because that way you can hear it more than once (and of course, most of us are pretty slow, so we need to hear things many times before we can remember them).

In all seriousness now, the "full understanding" line is the single most offensive thing I've read in music-related discourse in quite a while. I most certainly do not understand fully why music has such a profound effect on me. I think that if I did, it would lose some of it's attraction. That's not a white or a black sentiment, that's the sentiment of all people who play music for it's own sake rather than to have their ego stroked. If you aren't in it for the music; if you're a Stanley Crouch type who's more concerned with who and how than what; if you believe that people of different races are genetically predisposed to sound a certain way; then you are the one who lacks a "full understanding" and you really need to go hang out at Berkleeuntil you inevitably run into some kid from Uzbekistan who sounds like he grew up in Chicago. How's that for "cultural context"?

Assignment for Corey:at the first set break of your next gig, go up to five unknown white people in the audience and ask them why they came. Report back. (Extra credit: go up to five men and five women and ask them why they came. That question is on a lot of people's minds also, and is no less controversial.)

EXHIBIT E:

Wynton Marsalis recently appeared on The Daily Show, where he described the music of Armstrong, Ellington and Parker as "subversive." His latest release is supposed to carry on that tradition. I don't need to see a genuine copy of Wynton's tax return to get a decent idea of what he makes and how he lives, and I don't find that to be the least bit subversive, the provocative subject matter of his music notwithstanding. Let me tell you why. (note: I am not a blanket Wynton hater. J Mood is one of my favorites of all time; why the hell won't he do that anymore?)

To be an art musician of any kind is still subversive, but not in the way jazz used to be. Jazz musicians of all races live in less-than-affluent circumstances, eschewing "American Dream" bullshit in favor of a hard scrabble life with few lights at the end of the tunnel. Many own instruments that are worth the price of a car. Some of their record collections are worth more than that. In an age when "the best thing for America" is to earn as much money and buy as much plastic shit as humanly possible, they refuse to comply, even though many of them possess exceptional intellects and would have no trouble distinguishing themselves quickly in a more lucrative field. That is pretty damn subversive, but it is only indirectly related to continuing concerns about race. I don't think white people purposely infiltrated the ranks of the working stiff musician in order to hijack the subversive power of the jazz community away from race and towards their own agenda. I think it's merely a symptom of the quality of "real jazz" that it inevitably attracted such arduous followers from all over the place. In any case, subversive people are more dangerous than subversive music. If the current situation somehow represents a failure to fans of subversion, I think they have missed the point.

Conclusion/Full Disclosure/Considering The Source:

I am white and had a comfortable middle class upbringing, but my parents did not shelter me by any stretch of the imagination. I went to inner city public schools for all but 6th through 8th grade, including an elementary school that was at one point 70% black. That doesn't make me an expert on or a member of the culture (although a good high school friend once jokingly elected me and another white friend as official black people), but it does mean that I have more than just a cursory grasp on the past and the present of black history. Maybe it is insensitive to say so, but I do in fact feel downright victimized by much of what I've read over the last several weeks, if not in a rather minor way. It is genuinely disheartening. Why is it even worth complaining about from my end? Take these five exhibits together and you have an impossible situation. Go your own way and you are an ingrate, co-opting the jazz label without any justification. Follow tradition and you are simply stealing from black innovators. It's a catch 22.

Notice that only one of these five people take the position that white people are innately incapable of playing jazz, but that the various others lay out a web of demands which, taken together, cannot possibly be met. Simply by being white and playing most any form of American music, you are prone to run up against one of these objections. That's not the attitude that I see in the people I play with, nor is that an attitude I feel entitled to take towards European music. No, the race issue in jazz is not dead, but resolving it has got to be a two-way street. If there's anything I can do, I will, but I will not stop transcribing black musicians, nor will I stop working in avant-garde or "classical" influenced groups, and when pressed by a well-intentioned (if annoying) inquisitor about what kind of music I play, I will not hesitate to answer "jazz". "Full understanding" sounds more like "hidden agenda" to me. I have no agenda in doing these things other than to relieve the constant urge to make music, and I'd like to think that this attitude transcends all racial and social boundaries. I don't seek to understand my musical inclinations, only to translate them into tangible high-quality musical products (the establishment of that criterion being, of course, highly subjective and mediated only by my own value judgments). I take offense to no one who does the same, and I ask only the same treatment in return.

My Composition Lessons with Bartòk (Part 1)

The best composition lessons I ever had were the ones with Bartòk. In only 45 minutes, he would show me how to write counterpoint, how to orchestrate, how to manage large-scale form and orchestral forces, and even how to keep a sense of humor throughout the process. I came back every few days for a couple of weeks and we would go over the same material and the same concepts. Despite this, I never got tired of the lessons, and in fact, they just kept getting better. Strangely enough, the fact that he was not alive at the time didn't seem to have any adverse effects.

I'm talking, of course, about playing Bartòk's Concerto for Orchestra when I was in college. Why do I think this single experience (or set of experiences) was more helpful than spending 4 years earning a degree in composition? Many reasons.

•First, when performing a work as part of a large ensemble, one does not hear the music as the audience does, nor does one approach it the way a scholar does. The experience is unique, for you are required to listen across the ensemble for pitch, style, and dynamics in a way that makes you hyper-aware of the most intricate details of the score. Your position on stage "inside" the ensemble also gives you a unique and valuable acoustic perspective (I'd rather listen to music from there than from the audience or on record).

•Second, at least in a student ensemble, the work will be rehearsed many times, perhaps even too many for your preferences as a player in that ensemble, but this affords you many hearings not only of the whole piece, but of movements, sections, and partial instrumentations. You simply can't help but absorb (or at least notice) some of the salient compositional features of the work. Your heightened level of engagement and awareness throughout this process makes it all the more effective.

•Third, the rehearsal process and the conductor (presumably someone who knows a little something about the instruments in the orchestra) reveal an incredible amount about the capabilities of each instrument and how the piece in question does or does not use them effectively both individually and in combination with each other.

•Fourth, it is fun as all get out and keeps you intellectually and spiritually alive as a musician. If as an orchestral composer you have never actually played in the ensemble yourself, I say that speaks poorly on behalf of your compositional pedigree. If you have never even had any such desire in the first place, I say you have chosen the wrong profession.

I was merely skeptical of formal composition study before I played the Concerto for Orchestra. Having now had several such experiences in addition to this, I'm ready to dismiss all of you academic composers outright. Be honest: how many of you who write for orchestra play an orchestral instrument well enough to make it into the orchestra at the school(s) where you earned your degree(s)? How many of you actually did this? And how many of you actually got to play works from which you felt like you could learn something of significant value to your development as a composer? (sadly, the programming in the college orchestras I played in was rarely of the kind I am describing)

Let's stop pretending that just anyone can learn to read score like Pierre Boulez and that a feeble attempt at climbing this mountain is just as good or better than taking it in through your ears. If I ran the world, I would make performing in the ensemble of greatest interest to the student a part of all composition degrees. I would also demand that college orchestra directors program more works that are capable of serving this purpose effectively. During my college years, I played for one who did and one who didn't. The former experience was an absolute unqualified joy and is where the "lessons" I'm jokingly referring to took place. The other was an absolute unqualified disappointment where I learned nothing useful as either a composer or a performer. Do you think it's a coincidence that the former conductor was also an accomplished composer?

The majority of "great" composers have also been virtuouso performers, going back at least as far as Ockeghem and continuing through Bartòk, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. It has been pointed out recently and frequently that Steve Reich has played an important role in his own success by performing many of his works himself. And the jazz world speaks for itself on this matter.

People like me really should not accept the "autodidact" label from the credentialed elite. The next time one of them asks me who my teachers were, I'm going to answer "Bartòk, Debussy and Thelonious Monk among others. You?"

Your Musical Talents Needed

For only the third time in my adult life, I went to a protest/demonstration/rally last weekend. Such events were held worldwide to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. The event included a march of roughly a mile during which my fickle ears (hyuk hyuk) took note of some curious musical phenomena, including:

•a trumpet player playing "Charge" on the wrong partials (you can play it correctly on any brass instrument using any fingering if you start on the third partial and end on the sixth partial; somehow, this person was consistently ending on the fifth partial);

•a spontaneous a capella rendition of We Shall Overcome which modulated not only chromatically, but also diatonically (!) so that it ultimately landed in a key noticably below where it startedand ended on scale degree 7 instead of 1;

•a variety of solo and ensemble percussion music which displayed an exceptional rhythmic ineptitude.

To be clear, this is obviously my problem and not theirs. No one notices or cares about these things save for the few of us public conservatory-educated music dorks, and you can hear them anywhere and everywhere that large crowds gather and attempt to make spontaneous functional music (major league baseball games are the worst in my experience). It's not life and death by any means, but I am always intrigued (and call me an elitist, but also very disappointed) at the overall level of musicianship of the average Joe. I'm quite tempted to show up to the next one wearing a sousaphone, and if any of you other musicians out there ever have the time and inclination to attend such an event, please bring your instrument and musical talents along if at all possible. They are in high demand.

Another Pet Peeve About Music Blogs...

...is when they don't deal with music. I'll grant an exemption to politics given the dire events of the last several years, but that's it. I'll pass on literature, film, sports, literature, food, literature, literature, and most of all, the freaking LITERATURE!!!

For pretty much my entire life, I have had what could fairly be described as a pathological aversion to literature, or at least to fiction. I can only guess at the underlying reasons, but one might be that I do not desire nor have I ever particularly desired to escape reality. That's not to say that I'm content with the state of things, just to say that I generally struggle with the willful suspension of disbelief. Actually, I hated music from an early age also. It was a sheer accident that I ended up playing music in the first place. I've been hooked from the start, yet I've since had more extensive exposure to literature and theater without ever shedding my aversion to either. Not surprisingly, abstract visual art is the only other medium I feel a natural affinity for. There something about twisted piles of scrap metal and arbitrary smears of color that appeals to me much the same way that music does.

Maybe it's not so important to know why, but I do wish I could offer an explanation if for no other reason than that it is hard to defend a narrowly focused interest in abstract art. It has always irked me that whenever the "value of the arts" is under discussion, the last thing out of people's mouths is anything about enriching our lives aesthetically. No, instead it's always about making kids smart, keeping kids off drugs, keeping kids off the streets...come to think of it, it's almost always about kids period, always portraying "the arts" as the means to an end rather than an end unto themselves.

What is missing from the picture is any discussion of the mechanism by which the kids are to be engaged by the art. Is it too much to assume that this is accomplished through aesthetic means? And if it is accomplished some other way, what is the value of art, then? Nothing! Any old diversion can occupy (detain?) little Johnny and Susie, including knitting, bridge, and forced manual labor. If the results are any different with art, then there must be a reason.

The function of art as a means of keeping kids out of trouble or of clarifying or commenting on some social issue is indeed valuable, but it tends to overshadow the fact that any of these secondary functions of art are dependent on the art itself appealing to and engaging some audience. Would we be debating Wagner's anti-semitism today if his music had been average? We wouldn't even know who he was if that had been the case. (How many mediocre composers can you name who were active in the 1860's?) Whether or not it is acknowledged as such, the aesthetic experience is the source of all interest in art. Trace your way back from the co-optation du jour and you will arrive there every time as if tracing Earth's energy resources back to the sun.

Speaking of co-optation, the value of art may be an entirely separate discussion from the value of the arts at this point, the latter phrase being not only too broad to have any real legitimacy, but also having come to stand for something shallow and dishonest. If we really are willing to embrace the whole unwieldy collection of "the arts" as a unit, it follows that there is something for everyone hiding somewhere in that massive pile crap. That is where their eminent value lies. The trivial whiling away of the hours can be accomplished equally well by means of any old diversion, but where there is the potential for the unique form of engagement known as aesthetic experience, the arts have contributed something unique and important to the world. Artists themselves should be the last people to take that for granted.

We all know that the reason this value is never emphasized in any public arena is that granting agencies and elected officials are unimpressed by it. Hence, as a mere survival skill, artists have learned or been groomed to fall back on all of the secondary functions of their art, especially the ones involving kids. (What can we say? Everyone loves the little buggers.) My questions are: how much longer can we go on living on a little white lie? And with so many people in the art community actually believing this themselves, what is the value of "the arts" to the people who actually shape them?

Sadly, the kids don't dig my atonal orchestral pieces or my free jazz excursions. If I'm going to keep them away from drugs (and I might be the only musician I know who's actually capable of doing that), it's going to have to be some other way. Not only is it better for them that way, but it also gives me the freedom to continue wallowing in the realm of the abstract. There is no intuitive certainty strong enough to guarantee that our artistic output is valuable enough on its own to excuse us from any other efforts towards leaving the world in better condition than we found it in, and in fact, most of the time its probably more tenuous than we'd like to admit to assume that any old person in need would even like what we do. It is all too convenient to think that we can simply tie other obligations in with what we "really" want to be doing by giving our latest masterpiece a provocative title. Unfortunately, that only works if the work is world class, or if it has mass media hype behind it.

Who gets to go?

There was a time when I refused to show any inclination whatsoever towards moving to New York City. Every midwestern jazz player practically drools over the thought whether they've ever been there or not, which meant that my need to be different just for the sake of being different was in full effect. Sadly, I've still never been there, but now that I know a little bit more and have had some frustating experiences here in middle America, I have finally started thinking seriously about taking the plunge. What else is there to do?

The level of playing has never really intimidated me. That's not to say I expect to fit right in, but no matter where I live, I expect that I'll have to confront it anyway at some point in my career. If I don't, that will mean that I either got complacent or failed entirely. Competition is healthy and inspirational; why not embrace it?

What bothers me much more is the money question. A 2006 Worldwide Cost of Living survey conducted by Mercer Consulting named New York as the most expensive U.S. city and the 10th internationally. Rent.com says:

The overall cost of living here is 364% compared to the national average, making it just slightly less than California's Silicon Valley, the most expensive area in the nation. Average apartment rentals go for $1,600 per month, with utilities costing an average of $189 per month.

So, has money become the greatest determining factor in who among us naive young musicians is able to actually get up and strategically place ourselves in the center of the action? It's hard to believe that it hasn't. That's a dire situation in my opinion, not nearly as dire as the larger question of access to music education generally, but it is a result of the same deplorable phenomenon, namely of middle and lower income people being priced out of music on some level. One way that the internet will never really be able to bring us closer together is by facilitating in-person collaborative musical performance. Geographic isolation is a tremendous barrier to musical collaboration, so it's not so far-fetched to think that there really ought to be a "musical capital" of the world or country where we can all be available to each other. An astronomical cost of living, however, kills the whole thing.

It's not that wealth and artistic vision necessrily preclude each other, but in order to continue being a Mecca for artists of any kind, a scene must select for the latter and not the former. What's the consequence of the opposite case? A fetishized rat race dominated by brats with more money than talent. That's what college music programs are. That's what I want to get away from. That's what kills music. The thought of encountering a "real world" manifestation of that is nauseating. I'm crossing my fingers now.

I'm somewhat on the fortunate end of things. If I decide to go, I will find a way to make it work financially. However, none of the possible scenarios look easy. Maybe that means that the people who do manage to survive there are exceptional in many different ways. Maybe that means that there's a grain of truth to all of the idealization and mythology surrounding the place. On the other hand, that's part of the problem: mythology » co-optation » commodification » fetish, and then it's entirely too late to really get in on the action because there is no more action.

Having never actually been to the place, I probably don't know what I'm talking about, nor am I saying that music has to be made by poor people to be any good, nor am I slamming native New Yorkers. (although before posting this, I did check with a friend of mine who grew up there, and she made many of the same observations). It's something that makes me wonder, and the more I think about it, the more apparent it gets that as long as the cost of living remains so disproportionately high in our musical capital, and as long as the country as a whole continues to hemorrage decent-paying jobs to the third world, wealth will continue to eclipse talent as the primary determining factor not only in who gets to go to NYC, but in who gets to play and even listen to music in the first place. This is the major issue facing American music right now and it is seldom if ever discussed. The topic that does get discussed semi-regularly is the cost of going to jazz clubs. Maybe that will eventually lead to a more comprehensive discussion.

Pattern Recognition

The ability to recognize patterns varies in individuals and is not universal. It is a skill that can be honed, but it does not come to everyone with equal ease. The people who design standardized tests seem to think it's quite important. I remember that in elementary school, there was always that question where you would be given a sequence of numbers and asked to say what the next number in the sequence was. For some reason, I had a knack for these things from an early age. A knack that is, not an interest. Fast forward about 15 years to my first encounter with Schoenberg's statement that sequences in music are worthless and serve no particularly important function other than to take up space. There was a time when I might have disagreed, but by the time I read this, it served not as a challenge to but as an affirmation of my own feelings towards sequence in music. Sequence grates on me like few other devices. Particularly with regard to jazz musicians, it truly has become nothing more than a fallback, a way to take up space and avoid embarrassment when the player doesn't know what else to do.

It's no mystery how this happened: jazz musicians are taught theory largely through sequence. Instead of taking the most direct route towards studying the way past musicians "used"scales, students today are constantly nudged towards constructing patterns in order to internalize the sound and feel of scales and keys. I myself worked out of Coker's Patterns for Jazz and Nelson'sPatterns for Improvisation quite extensively in my late high school and early college years. As well asaccomplishing the afore mentioned objectives, it helped build my chops tremendously.

We must, however, be very careful in defining the word "use." Does anyone really "use" scales or scale patterns? It depends on what that means. A phrase that happens to only use C's, D's and E's could be said to "use" the C major scale, but did the player really arrive at it this way? If this observation is not supefluous, it should be. Obviously, some players do actually think of themselves as "using" scales and some don't. I should not necessarily be predisposed to prefer one group over the other, but in fact, given the situation, the "use" of scales equates directly to the "use" of sequence in a way that I consistently find distasteful.

To put it another way, very few musicians who play sequences truly "use" them, as this term implies some certain intent on the part of a sentient being. Instead, they have spent so much time practicing scale patterns that when nothing else comes to mind, they habitually lapse into regurgitating a literal statement of what they have been praticing, even if it was never intended to be "used" this way in performance.

My point? Sometimes an etude is just an etude. In classical music, there are etudes that are performed (like Chopin's) and etudes that no one would dare allow to be heard outside the practice room (like much of the Arban book). Jazz could learn something from this practice. Patterns build chops and help the player conceive of keys, but they make poor materials with which to construct a solo, or any piece of music for that matter. (And I have to add that I have about the same feelings toward "materials" and "construct" in this context as I do toward "use.") In my mind, technical exercises that were constructed solely for their value as technical exercises and not as "real"music should not be available to be "used" (or abused) at all. They are of a fundamentally different nature than any "lick" a musician might pick up from others, which originated as a spontaneous and effective musical statement and retains at least a small amount of this potential over time. That's my opinion, at least. I am appalled that some musicians apparently do think that their practice of scale patterns serves to literally prepare "material" for"use" that they can pull out at any time while "constructing" something. I have no problem with such perparation, only with the chosen material. As an early teacher of mine wisely told me, use patterns with "extreme caution and restraint."

But what of the ability to recognizepatterns? If it was more universal, musicians would not get away with these shenanigans as often because more people would understand what they are doing and hear right through it. I hypothesize that my loathing of sequence is at least partially a consequence of it being so easy to recognize, and perhaps also that the ability to view something as sequential even if it was not intended that way has ruined my ability to enjoy a good deal of music. But the ability to recognize sequence is not the only variable: the other is how the listener responds to success or failure in this activity. Hence, I further hypothesize that some people must be gratified simply by recognizing sequence in music (i.e. by "getting it") and some people (like me) are indifferent or putoff by it. Given two two-way variables, that makes for four groups of listeners who will each approach the issue differently

Backbeat

Why are so many "serious" musicians so mystified as to how to garner mass appeal? It's the backbeat, silly.

You can play whatever you damn well please over a strong backbeat. The masses want to hear the thunderous footsteps of mythical beasts on beats 1 and 3 along with massive quantities of ear-splitting high-frequency brittleness on beats 2 and 4. If you give them those two things together, they will go ape shit for your musical presentation, no matter what melodic or harmonic atrocities you commit over the top of Western man's most primal rhythm.

Seriously, when was the last time you saw a song on myspace with 48,629 listens?? And when was the last time that so many of the harmonic and melodic ideas were so unabashedly "outside"?

Personally, I can only appreciate the backbeat thing when there's this kind of playing going on along with it, but I'll bet that many many people who think a tri-tone sub is a sandwich could be engaged by this kind of music also, if not for entirely different reasons.

It's not that us modernists have no heart, soul, or rhythm. We just need a little side of pitch to go with a heaping plate of rhythm.

In Between, But Not On Top Of

The imitation of another musician's personal style is often considered to be an act of reverence. If the imitation is too close, it may cross over into the realm of plagiarism. But more often than either of these, it is an act of vanity.

When John Q. Composer writes a new work that is significantly indebted to a previous one yet is of lesser quality, the most important thing about the new work is that he is the one who created it. It fills no particular void or need, for the work he has imitated does so already, and in fact does so more effectively.

Even within the confines of an antiquated musical style, there is always room for expansion in between extant masterpieces. However, there is no room for stacking new works on top of them.

Use, Don't Abuse

I recall that rather amusing moment in the early days of TubeNet when the first person dared to verbalize what we'd all been observing for quite some time: that the board was all but idle on evenings and weekends. This person dared to view this as evidence that most TubeNet contributors were simply using it as a way to slack off at work. Mere conjecture? Maybe not...

Allow me to tell a story from several weeks ago. For some reason, I was up well before noon on a weekday and tried to post a blog entry around 11am. No luck. The server was obviously overwhelmed by demand and hadn't the capacity to even load the page where you enter the text. I've had this blog for six months and that had never happened before...because I almost always post in the late afternoon before I leave to teach lessons.

Of course, being a musician, I myself am rarely at work (or even awake) before noon, so who am I to conclude that the high e-traffic during the late morning hours is entirely the fault of the chronically procrastinating cubicle monkeys that are today's excuse for an American middle class? It does make me wonder, though, because it has to be attributable to some larger trend. It also reminds me that by devoting any amount of non-leisure time to our blogging enterprises, us musico-bloggers are dancing on a fine line between journalism/criticism and slackerism.

When around friends, I'm downright embarrassed to refer to either reading or writing a blog, and given what most blogs actually are, maybe I should be. The web has a lot to offer to both the work-a-holics and the straglers, but it is a slippery slope to say the least. I promise never to blog while teaching or performing if the rest of you would please just GET BACK TO WORK!


Deal?

Getting Fickler All The Time

"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."

Slowly but surely, I'm learning not to buy CD's that get reviewed favorably (or at all) by major publications, as well as to stay as far away as possible from the most widely publicized events. If people are talking or writing about it, I'm probably not going to like it.

It is notably rare for me to be truly invigorated by a performance that costs more than $5 to attend. If it costs more than that, it's because whoever organized it knows that they can get more than that...which in Minneapolis means that it is statistically impossible that everyone who shows up will be there to listen rather than to see and be seen. So count me out from now on.

Call me a grandstander, curmudgeon, or whatever else you want, but I'm starting to get serious about this. As a teacher/mentor of mine once said to me: "Funny. If its got the word 'jazz' in front of it, I'm usually not interested." So, uh, anyone up for a trip to a "jazz club"? How about reading a "classical music" blog? I didn't think so. The more exciting stuff is taking place elsewhere, under names that have not been around long enough to be co-opted for marketing purposes, and yes, occasionally under no name at all. I don't necessarily need or want to be "beyond category" myself. I don't take offense when someone calls me a "bebop tuba player" or a "classical" musician. As a listener, however, I'm finding myself in a "once bitten twice shy" type of situation (actually, I've been bitten many more times than that; it just took me an embarrasingly long time to figure these things out)

That a concert may be accompanied by lots of publicity and high ticket prices is more indicative of the visibility of the performer(s) than it is of their relevance to a "classical" or "jazz" audience.

"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."

Enough Already

Reading the comments on this by a certain "Mark" has set me off. Thank you Mark for taking it upon yourself to set the jazz world straight by pointing out that "many jazz musicians have abandoned their audience." I suppose this means that we deserve to be floundering around in a world where we pay to play in clubs? (that would be the implication of the comment given the context in which it was made)

Pardon the outburst, but I've had it with this garbage. It is everywhere, and it is totally ass backwards thinking. I suppose you could also say that Stravinsky abandoned his audience in 1912, as did Beethoven in the early 1800's and Charlie Parker himself in the late 1940's. There would be no Rite of Spring, no Grosse Fuge, and no jazz at all for that matter if people like Mark had their way in those earlier eras. Mass appeal cannot be allowed to dictate the course of art in ethical terms. I doubt that Mark would enjoy living in such a world, but that is exactly what he seems to be advocating.

Each individual has the best idea of what they think music should be. Do it yourself by playing, and/or support others who do it by purchasing their recordings and going to their shows, but please don't make these kinds of inflammatory blanket generalizations about everything new. You could regret it as soon as next month.

Dial "P" for Piggy-Back

I hate to get involved in these things, but here goes nothin'...

A challenge was issued here earlier this week. You can peruse the responses in the comments to that post.

Ostensibly, the point of this game is to uncover unexpected results. But is anyone surprised to see that all of these "classical music" bloggers have so much non-classical music loaded on their iPods? I'm not, so speaking of Musicology, I hereby dial "M" and issue a follow-up challenge for everyone who responded (or even those that didn't). Consider the following scenario:

You are a Musicology professor in a respectable public university music department. You are teaching the final course in the undergraduate music history sequence, which deals with music from the late 19th century through the present day while placing particular emphasis on the American 20th Century. Topics for the final paper are to be chosen by each student individually, but must be approved by you, the professor. A student approaches you to ask if he/she may write their final paper on Thelonious Monk.

Do you approve or reject this request? Why or why not?

Post your responses here or on your own blogs. If at least five people respond, I'll post my own answer here (as well as a list, which will have to be drawn from my iTunes playlist or CD shelf since I don't have an iPod).

Fusion

Yeah, yeah, yeah, labels/genres are stupid and we all hate them. "...but is it jazz?" and "...but is it music?" are easily the two dumbest questions asked during the last century. But can I make a confession about my take on the 1970's "fusion" of jazz and rock? It does not at all sound to me like equal parts jazz and rock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, who cares? I'm not saying it's bad or that I hate it. I like a lot of it. But I at least sympathize with the jazz purists of the time on this one: insisting to the death on calling it "jazz" is indeed an odd choice. It seems like most "real" rockers today have utter contempt for "real" jazz, making it hard for someone my age (i.e. not even alive in the 70's) to understand why the fusion people would covet the "jazz" label so much. It can't be for marketing purposes; calling something "jazz" is an excellent way to shoot yourself in the foot. Could it be that bebop virtuosity makes them insecure about their own shortcomings, so they try to appropriate the label and its supposed status without doing any of the actual shedding? Don't answer that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'm elitist/young/stupid/misguided/whatever. It just intrigues me when someone pulls a doublethink on us and no one says anything. Debussy abhorred the term "impressionism" (and to his credit, did say something about it), but we freely apply that term to his music without a second thought. It was nearly a decade after I learned the word "fusion" that I first heard the term "prog rock." To me, this is the missing link in the label game, yet Mahavishnu Orchestra and Lifetime are still "fusion" while Gentle Giant and ELP are "prog." To the contrary, it would seem to me that some of Dave Holland's or Joshua Redman's recent work, for example, are much more even-steven hybrids of jazz and rock, and hence more deserving of the label "fusion" (which is to say deserving of it in the literal sense, but not the one it has since acquired; their music is outstanding while "fusion" has become yet another "useful term of abuse" akin to the worst ism money can buy).

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this post was a waste of everyone's time because it deals with categorization. Never mind then.

Willingly Excluded and Loving It

It seems to me that examining the similarities and differences between classical music concerts and professional sports events could teach us something, or at least raise some interesting questions. Specifically, I'm wondering why we read so much about audiences feeling "excluded" at orchestra concerts when the audience for sporting events is really no more involved. The vast majority of sports fans never set foot on the field (they'd be arrested if they did), have never met their favorite player in person, probably could not relate to this player as a person terribly well in any case, and have a negligible (if any) effect on the outcome of the game. If sports fans readily accept such "exclusion", why do we end up with ridiculous stories like this article from Andante (old news in the musico-blogosphere, I suspect), which reports a case of patrons complaining about the facial expressions of the musicians during concerts?

I can see the musicological platitudes coming down Broadway (think Minneapolis, not New York City; that means that this particular group of platitudes rolls in a beat up Cadillac, not a stretch limo). Nonetheless, I'm not convinced that the two (concerts and sports) are quite as different as one might want to think. More accurately, I guess what I'm saying is that they are not that different to me. Say what you want, but the more I think about it, the more I'm realizing that I'm attracted to music and sports for almost exactly the same reasons, and that I'm upset about trends in both that have a striking amount in common. As with music, my attraction to sports is aesthetic: I find the spectacle of a diving catch or a three-point shot to be aesthetically pleasing. I'm one of those morons who can watch or even just listen on the radio to practically any baseball, basketball or football game, regardless of who is playing, and be entertained. What ruins the experience for me is when the commentators try to explain minutia of strategy or the players' lives during the broadcast in an effort to create a "story line". The game is the story line, dumbasses!

What are the parallels? Sometime ago, classical music organizations decided that it was a good idea to attempt to explain the form of an unfamiliar piece before playing it for an audience. I've never thought this was particularly productive, and now I'm more convinced than ever that I'm right. Of course, I know most of those things already when it comes to music, so I'm not particularly well-qualified to evaluate their efficacy on an audience of dilettantes. In the case of sports, however, I occupy something closer to the place of the now proverbial "non-musician listener", the one who knows nothing technical about music but enjoys listening to it (or thinks they do). The highest level of sports I ever played at was high school, yet as a sports fan, I really don't care which player has a great sense of humor, which coach is a genius, or how the pitcher grips his change-up. I just want to watch the damn game, and I don't need anyone trying to make it seem more interesting or important than it actually is (or perhaps in some cases, painting it as something that it is not).

On the other hand, I'm about as into NASCAR as the average orchestra patron is into Milton Babbitt. There's not a whole hell of a lot anyone could do to get me to watch NASCAR. I don't care about the supposed skill involved or who's using which kind of engine; a bunch of cars driving around in a circle is not engaging to me, and no depth of understanding about the peripheral issues can change that. If we accept this approach to music, we reach the conclusion that there's nothing we can do when someone threatens to boycott the orchestra if the players don't smile more (or if they insist on playing Babbitt). As unpopular an opinion as it is, I say we let them walk away rather than pandering to the dilettante sensibility. We don't need them (or it) any more than NASCAR needs me. The music and the sport speak for themselves.

I've seen it written that the difference is that sports fans are "emotionally" involved, and that they have the freedom to move around, chit chat, and basically do whatever the hell they want while they're in the stadium. However, there are still rules: no running on the field, no throwing object at players, assigned seats, etc. etc. If I had a choice in the matter,of course, I would be on the field competing, or at least sitting in the front row, but the fact that I'm not doesn't really make me feel excluded, nor does the fact that the players don't really acknowledge my presence any more than a musical performer acknowledges their audience at the end of a piece.

What keeps me coming back to sporting events is that I enjoy them on a very basic level, so basic in fact that it is much easier to screw it up than it is be make improvements. What room for improvement there is lies almost entirely in simplifying the experience by eliminating the extracurricular distractions. Whether in sports or music, piling on layers of story lines, technical information, program notes, personal information about the participants, advertising, and so on represents a move in the opposite direction.

Your Comments Always Welcome (read: is anyone out there...???)

In enabling comment moderation, I inadvertently also limited posting privileges to "team members." I think I've got it straightened out now. I intend for this blog to invite comment rather than discourage it, so feel free to chime in at any time. (even if you play for another team)

Greater and Lesser Divides

As the subtitle "death by eclectic chair" is meant to imply (thankfully for you it's a pun, not a typo), this blog is showing signs of going in phases in terms of subject matter, the current manifestation of which would appear to be an abnormal preoccupation with issues relating to the orchestra in various ways. Rather than resisting this, I'm going to embrace it and have yet another post on the topic (remarkable for someone who once alienated a college orchestra conductor by accidentally blurting out that "orchestral brass players are just a bunch of jocks" within his earshot). I've been reading this, obtained by way of Henry Fogel's blog, and of course, I have an opinion and will subject you to it presently.

I originally got into blogging (reading them, that is, more than writing them) by way of the whole "saving classical music" thing that the Arts Journal people in particular are always on about. There are, of course, still good reasons to be having such a discussion; nevertheless, I am growing weary of articles like this. It once seemed very much appropriate, very hip and avant garde in a pedestrian sort of way to be taking the long view on these issues out of concern for the future of the music. Now I just bristle. Why? For one thing, it is no longer avant garde at all: this article is more detailed and informative than most, but is really just making the same recommendations and is based on the same premises as most everything one reads on this subject. The other part of the problem is that some of these premises are tenuous.

Before I get into more specific/substantive critiques, let me first say that between the things I read in these kinds of articles and the things I've observed in peers of mine who aspire to orchestral jobs, I can only laugh when they say things to me like, "Freelancing??!! That's a terrible way to make a living!" To each his own, my friends. I will not pass judgement on you if you agree not to do the same to me. Most pros I've talked to personally absolutely love their jobs, whether they are orchestral players or total freelancers. (according to this and other articles, that's most likely because none of them have been orchestral string players, who, true to what is said behind their back in music school, really do seem to be a bunch of emotional malcontents) Even aside from what happens to them after they win the job, it seems to me that there certainly is a personality gap between orchestral pros and the rest of music (not surprising considering the necessary preparation; maybe that will be fodder for another post).

Now, here's what I think is more objectively wrong with this article. In attempting to "bridge" one gap (namely, that between what student musicians think their job description will be in a pro orchestra and what it actually is), the recommendations made here would just create a new gap between how academia trains them to fulfill these obligations and how they actually have to be dealt with in practice. The article advocates for conservatories to implement required classes on fundraising and outreach activities, complaining that most aspiring orchestral musicians win their first audition with no knowledge whatsoever of these things and must learn "on the job." I'm certainly willing to take their word for it, BUT...considering all the aspects of musical training where one is already struggling with theory-versus-practice issues, this just appears to me to be one more. It could do a little bit of good, but say someone from Minneapolis gets really good at schmoozing with donors here and subsequently wins an orchestral job in the deep south. Can you say culture shock? There are elements to social interaction that are not taught in school because they cannot be taught in school. To put it mildly, I think that these are idealistic recommendations. It all sounds peachy in theory, but I'm not holding my breath for a breakthrough. I suppose we'll find out in due time if the program at Eastman, for example, bears any fruit.

There was a larger theme (I was laughing, actually) running throughout the article whereby it is repeatedly implied that orchestral musicians lack social skills (the word curmudgeon was used at one point). I am again willing to take their word for lack of sufficient personal experience. However, by the time they get to college, is it not a little bit late to start working on this? While college was overall a productive and enjoyable experience for me, it felt way too much like high school already. Many professors took attendance and factored it into grading; students repeatedly whined and coerced instructors into granting opportunities for extra credit or throwing out certain test questions; and as a music major, 89 out of the 120 credits I needed to graduate had to be in my major, which meant that I had almost no real decisions to make when it came time to register for classes. If you had also required me to take a class on outreach and another one on grantsmanship and another one on wine and cheese party etiquette, I might have quit. Actually, there is very little in the classes that I did have to take that I could not have learned elsewhere (common critique of majoring in music which I should have heeded before jumping in). How about we reserve valuable credit hours for those things instead of micromanaging every last detail of everything else? I'm not aware of other fields where the training aspires to be not only intellectual and practical but also social. People simply are panicked in music to the point of irrationality because money is drying up faster than you can spell "anacrusis".

Now for the most galling line of the entire thing:
"Rather than simply introducing a piece of music by offering factual background...[actor/arts educator Eric Booth] teaches musicians how to connect emotionally to introduce a piece."
Touché. Did I mention that Ligeti's piano etudes make me happy, or that Dolphy's "Out to Lunch" makes me feel invigorated? Anyone can play this game. It doesn't take a workshop with some "arts educator" to develop, and it's not going to make Ligeti or Dolphy fans out of an audience of conservative midwestern suburbanites. In case anyone was wondering, that's why it has not traditionally been used in pre-concert talks. With all due respect toMr. Booth, I can't help but bristle at the apparent total absence from his resume of any relevant experience as a musician. Leave it to an actor to tell you that your shoe is untied while you're wearing sandals.

Is it criminal that some of us just want to play our damn instruments, that this is the reason we pursue careers in music, and that we don't need or even always want to know anything about the composer or the performers in order to enjoy listening to the music? I suspect that we have always been here and that we're not going away any time soon. I also know that we are not all "curmudgeons" as the article implies, but that somehow our passion is not readily communicated by our intuitive actions as functional musicians. The message here seems to be that perhaps the place for us is no longer as professional orchestral players. Good thing I got the message in time without anyone having to tell me.

Too Much Information

It was not without trepidation that I recently filled out some parts of my blogger profile that I had previously left blank (specifically, the "about me" and "favorite music" sections). Gratuitous and trivial? Mostly. At best, it could help to contextualize some of my more audacious comments. At worst, it marks me as someone who got the flu and had nothing better to do in between hacks and sniffles. The fact that I had to cut down the list of music to fit within the maximum allowable number of characters is particularly telling of how sick I was. In any case, enjoy.

I've also updated and augmented the links section, including some more of my music (if you haven't visited my website lately, I've tweaked it a bit as well).

Finally, astute readers may notice some suspicious dates and times on my posts. Yes, I admit it: I often write posts ahead of time, leave them alone for a few days, then edit them accordingly. Hopefully this isn't in violation of any written or unwritten blogging etiquette. I think it's worth it to aim to present more complete thoughts, or at least as complete as I can manage.

Another Contest Conundrum

I've entered a few composition contests in my time, but until this spawned this and this, I never stopped to think about entry fee-to-prize ratio or any of the other criticisms that were leveled. What I find galling above all else about contests is when the application form asks the entrant to list the schools they've attended and the teachers they've studied with (as with this one, which I've occasionally considered entering). From reading the entry form, it seems at least somewhat ambiguous as to whether this information is absolutely required (could I write "N/A"?), and gives no hint whatsoever as to why they are requesting it. I know I've seen this in other places as well, but I can't seem to recall what they were. Having had no individual instruction in composition, I usually shy away when a contest requests school and teacher information, figuring that they are basically rigged in favor of "university composers" or whatever we are calling them now.

Wait, what's that I hear? Ah yes, it's the footsteps of the NewMusicBox graduate student types walking over to their computers in order to attempt to rationalize with me. "It's not like the judges actually take that into consideration." Well then maybe they should ask for everyone's favorite color as well. I sure hope they don't actually take your education into consideration in the judging process, but why request the information in the first place? Do they judge you more harshly if you had a really good teacher and more favorably if you had a really shitty one? If it really didn't matter to them either way, you'd think that they would want to avoid learning these kinds of things about the entrants so as to remain as unbiased as possible. And yes, I know that one does not remain "unbiased" when judging artworks against each other, but the "bias" in that case is an aesthetic (musical) bias, not a personal (extramusical) bias. Or could it be that the absence of formal compositional training is such an accurate predictor of aesthetic bias that this information is actually useful to them in the judging? In other words, is it so that they can separate the "serious" (schooled) entries from the junk (unschooled) entries?

Some people may disagree with me, but I find that attitude to be more than a little bit misguided. (seriously Colin, an analogy between training composers and racehorses??!! I couldn't have fabricated a more timely critique out of thin air and bottle of hard liquor.) Of course, it's their contest. They can do whatever they want, and I should have better things to worry about anyway, like writing more unschooled music and not fixing my embouchure. I'll never be happier about being wrong than if someone can tell me conclusively that there is a valid reason for requesting this information with a submission to a composition contest.

We Travel The Blogways

As I continue to avoid practicing orchestal excerpts, a cursory glance at recent online developments yields a newfound awareness of several intriguing diversions. With bloggers everywhere still emerging one by one from holiday-induced hibernation, my neighbors might actually get some sleep this week.

Was it not just last week that in the midst of a flu-induced haze I wrote that I had never seen Var�se's name mentioned on a blog? Suburban Scene breaks the streak, if it ever really existed at all, by stating that he finds the master of organized sound to be boring. Fair enough.

You say you want comedy? Tears of a Clownsilly delivers. Reminds me of my friend from college who took a jazz course offered by the Afro-American Studies department. By the end of the semester, he could have written this (but props to pws for doing the honors anyway).

Finally, Drew McManus links to an interesting article of his on orchestras and recording. The stats on free versus paid downloads induced a kind of composite laugh/gag on my part, although I guess it is anything but surprising. Of course, before you go running off for your free Beethoven, don't forget that you can download a whopping 20 minutes of my too-tonal-but-not-tonal-enough/kinda-inside-but-kinda-outside junk for free right here. I live to serve.

And the title of the post? Well, you'll just have to imagine the music of Sun Ra whilst traveling. (who could forget it?) Now get lost. I need to practice.

Doomed To Repeat

Everyone should read this post by Kyle Gann. My jaw was on the floor a couple of times. I want to say I agree with him, but that would not be putting it correctly. The correct thing to say is that I always wanted to say what he said but that I never knew enough to do so with confidence. If I had tried to express those ideas in writing, it would count as pure conjecture; coming from him however, it means something.

This wasn't even the first time this week that I felt simultaneously validated and beaten to the punch. For Christmas, I received a copy of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation and Other Essays." I've just begun to scratch the surface, but I am already both pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised with the contents of this book; pleasantly because I agree with so much of it, but unpleasantly because some of her ideas bear a striking (and in one notable case, even literal) resemblance to what I though were my own original insights. If you were to read some of my more extended writings on music with an awareness of Sontag, you'd probably see me as anything from an leech to a plagiarist, particularly the part about descriptive versus prescriptive approaches.

The adage about those who don't know history is somewhat appropriate here, but for the moment, I'm not nearly as concerned about my own ignorance in reproducing these ideas as about the fact that I was led in this direction simply by observing and reacting to the world around me. If someone else leveled these same criticisms 40 years ago, and if this work is now hailed as "a modern classic" (according to the back cover), why have things remained so much the same that someone living now could independently observe the same phenomena and take issue with them for the same reasons? Kyle quoted a 150 year-old document in his post that was so relevant to modern day composition training, it could have been written last week. Are we to conclude that composers haven�t learned a thing in 150 years?

Before anyone beats me to it, here's my next big conjecture: rational thought and civilized dialogue have taken us quite a long way, so far in fact that I think we're starting to identify some wholly irreconcilable differences among musicians that will persist until the end of time. It's hard not to see the musical landscape as a collection of us-versus-them propositions: academic composers versus intuitive composers, scale-mongering jazz musicians versus purely melodic players, Greg Sandow and his cultural contexts versus me and my abstract musical structures. I even think that the conflict over absolute and program music has remained and will remain unresolved in some important ways.

Once such a conflict has spanned several generations and enveloped participants who are wholly ignorant of its long history, I�d say we have reached an impasse. Besides actually caring about these things, I enjoy the debate for its own sake, yet I often wonder if the latter isn't the only thing keeping the debate going at all at this point. If people the likes of Sontag and Gann say these things and nothing changes, perhaps there isn't much of anything left for the rest us to do about it than to put our ideas into practice and let the results speak for themselves. Greg Sandow jokes in his �book� that since he�s a composer, maybe he should write a piece to show where he thinks classical music needs to go. After some of the things I�ve read on his blog, I�d say this is nothing less than an obligation!

Instead of debating the justification (or lack thereof) for requiring undergraduate music students to interpret pure instrumental pieces programmatically as part of their course of study, how about we let the musicologists go on beating their meat and instead debate the merits of B-flat tubas versus C tubas? Finale software versus Sibelius software? Coke versus Pepsi? That ought to get us somewhere.

Idle Thoughts After a Long Day

#1- Low humidity coupled with low temperatures is one of mother nature's many ways of saying "I hate you" to brass players. #2- Who on earth is bored enough to harmonize and orchestrate Charlie Parker's entire solo on "Confirmation" for a big band sax section? I'm sure it was cool at one time, and even I would have thought it was cool at one point in my life, but today I'm just not feeling it (possibly as a result of #1).

The Room Gets Smarter...(or not)

I finally got the bug that is going around, so I've been holed up the last few days trying to recover. Out of sheer frustraton, I actually turned on classical public radio, which normally bores me to tears. Alas, they were playing opera. My distaste for opera is so intense that I used to literally leave the opera sections of my music history exams blank and take a B- because I could not bear to study it; BUT, without any frame of reference or even being able to determine the language, I made an educated guess within a couple of minutes that the composer was Puccini. And I was right.

I've done this before. I'd like to brag about it, but I'm really more embarrassed that it has come to this. I am a hardcore music junkie, yet it seems like there is so much out there that it is still difficult to have a conversation with anyone else without being embarrassed at my own lack of knowledge. Depending on who you're talking to, "20th century Classical" might include Puccini, or it might not; "contemporary jazz" might mean Cecil Taylor or it might mean Kenny G. I feel like such an idiot savant most of the time, but that's because you don't hear the music that I do know on the radio at all (or really anywhere, come to think of it). Even among like-minded and thoroughgoing friends and collarborators, our breadth of knowledge does not always overlap.

It's frustrating, but it's reality. Despite the occasional embarrassing moment, I will continue to eschew impressive knowledge in favor of what I deem to beuseful knowledge. In a way, I'm envious of the musicologist types who can talk intelligently about damn near anything, but I think its always more important to consider knowledge as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself (not necessarily saying they are guilty of this). My ignorance of Puccini isn't particularly handicapping to my performing or compositional endeavors; on the other hand, it would be practical that my near total ignorance of Cecil Taylor be addressed sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day, and decisions like this must be made all the time if one is to accomplish anything meaningful in the allotted time.

Although I don't plan on putting forth any more effort than I already have towards mending my relationship wih either the local classical station or opera (other than finally obtaining a DVD of Wozzeck, which holds the most promise on the latter count), I guess there's still a glimmer of hope, for in my invalid half-sleep state, I almost enjoyed listening to Act III of Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" (purely as abstract sound, of course). Now if they would just play more Ligeti...

The Dark Horse

What jumps out at me about much of the discourse on the internet concerning contemporary classical music is that there are an awful lot of factions and isms running around loose. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks the other day that there is a personal style that I seem to think I hear echoed constantly in the work of composers presently in their 20's and 30's that has no ism associated with it and is seldom (never) mentioned. It is not that of Webern, Babbitt, Reich or Feldman but that of Varèse.

I'm sure that at least some of this is coincidental, but I find it interesting anyway (if not just for the fact that if I'm wrong about this in any objectifiable way, then it says something rather interesting about me instead). I hesitate to use a phrase along the lines of "hangs over it like a dark cloud" in this situation because for the most part, I like the music of Varèse. Unfortunately, if I intend to make any sort of worthwhile point with this entry, I can't avoid inadvertently trashing him in some respects because by and large, I am usually unhappy when I perceive his influence lurking behind a new work.

Reasons for this? Number one would be that harmony is my favorite element of music, even though I'll readily accept the most liberal definition of what it might be. Varèse pushes me to my limits in this respect, yet one always senses that he knows what he's doing. In appropriating only parts of his style, it would not be difficult to come up with something which could drive me permanently batty. That brings us to number two , which would be that try as we might, we are not all as clever as Varèse, who himself wrote an absolute masterpiece (in my opinion) that is replete with near direct quotes from an even more famous work (I'm referring to Ameriques and The Rite of Spring).

I'm not sure I can remember the last time I read the word "Varèse" on my computer screen, yet I cannot forget all of the pieces I've suffered through at student composition recitals and new music concerts which seem to take Varèse's approach to sound without any discernible (or at least skillfull) approach to pitch, whether his or someone else's. Coincidence, or dark horse?

More On (moron?) Orchestral Excerpts

Event #1: I had a conversation with another musician several months ago where he said that too many players and teachers use orchestral excerpts to learn to play the instruments rather than learning the instruments in order to play the excerpts. Event #2: I had a student of mine order the newfangled Bordogni for Tuba thing from Encore; in the preface, it said something to the effect of: these etudes should be used strictly for developing musicality and not at all for developing technique.

Can you say chicken and egg? Technique does not grow on trees (and even if it did, by now some multi-national corporation would have seen to the overthrow of a third-world government to get their hands on it and be selling it for megabucks, which most certainly do not grow on trees either...but I digress). The first of these two points is well-taken: no tubist is going to be able to approach the Ride or Fountains without some serious shedding of less difficult material. On the other hand (and I'm speaking from personal experience in making this next point), there's no shame in using the excerpts to shore up deficiencies in an advanced player. I've always been a high range specialist with a weak low range; loud low excerpts are my achilles heel, and there doesn't seem to be any way for me to address this concern without just jumping in to the actual music itself. On the third hand, my interlocutor makes an important point: this most certainly did NOT work when I as a much weaker player overall (four years ago or so) made my first serious pass at these things. Now that I'm older, wiser, and more proficient, things are coming together in a more promising fashion (relatively speaking, of course).

As for the Bordogni thing, I'm floored by that comment. What better tool to use for working on breath control, slurring, extreme registers, and even ear training? Where and by what means are students to hone these skills if not with Bordogni and similar works? This brings me to the issue that trumps all of these previous arguments, a realization which I was close to making independently but eventually heard made by several leading brass teachers both in person and in print. It is crucial to (a) use "real music" as much as possible in your practice, and (b) play everything musically and with artistic intent whether it is "real music" (excerpts, solos, improv, etc.) or not (scales, arpeggios, tonguing exercises, etc.). If you follow that advice, you'll be in good shape more often than not because, if nothing else, you will continue to enjoy playing longer and avoid burning out.

Living In a Box?

In composition, there is a fine line between "finding your voice" and painting by number; between giving each piece a personal touch and writing the same piece over and over. As a composer, I have never been particularly interested in larger guiding principles such as sonata form, serialism, metric modulation, etc. even though there are plenty of pieces I enjoy by other composers which use these devices. In fact, I usually enjoy listening to them right up until the point where I start to really hear the method, at which point the music always loses a little bit of its luster, at least to me.

Of course, some if not all of these devices were codified as such after the fact, but even so, later composers often pick them up and embrace them as part and parcel of their compositional technique. Not to say that this is wrong in any intrinsic sense, but I have never understood this, nor have I ever felt compelled to do it, even when the method is of my own invention, as in the piece I wrote which followed a nearly strict pattern of meter changes: 7/4 5/4 3/4 -or- 7/4 5/4 7/4 5/4 3/4. This led to a cool "counting down" effect whereby the bars got progressively shorter; the process would then repeat itself. Among all of my compositions, this idea had the most possibilities for further development; however, I have yet to find what I deem a legitimate need or even a suitable use for it outside of the piece from which it arose as an intuitive creation. That's just how I am.

I believe that the "personal voice" operates on deeper level than the compositional device. I tremendously enjoy approaching each subsequent piece as an opportunity to create something entirely different from everything else I have written, and it particularly intrigues me when composers say things along the lines of "Oh, I've moved on to x approach" or "I only work in x medium/style now." I always want to ask, "What was it about the previous approach was preventing you from taking the new approach?" I'd like to think that the ideal for a composer would be to be able to answer "Nothing," meaning of course that you would not need to change approaches midstream in the first place.

Lost (not the TV show)

About a month ago now, I mailed entries to two composition contests by way of Priority Mail. As always, I availed myself of the USPS's delivery confirmation option. This service provides no indemnity coverage, but it does tell you when your stuff was delivered...if it was delivered. That's where the story gets interesting, for it appears that according to both the delivery confirmation (or lack thereof) and the people administering the respective contests, the envelopes were in fact never delivered.

One contest had a December 1 postmark deadline, so unless the original envelope turns up and makes it there before they start the judging, that one is a lost cause. No big deal; I threw that one together just for the hell of it and wasn't honestly expecting anything to come of it. The other one is a different story; I wrote the piece especially for it and was hopeful of at least turning someone's head on the committee. The deadline for that one is not until sometime next month, so I should still be able to enter...that is unless this is part of a larger plot by Kinko's to get all of my money from making x number of copies of my pieces. Or perhaps it's a sign from God that these contests aren't worth the trouble, which if I believed in God would be very thoughtful of him to say to me because he'd probably be correct. Of course, even without a God, there's still the blogosphere to tell me this, but as an uncompromising autodidact with no teachers to advocate for my work and very little hope of getting anything performed by anyone but myself, what else is there to do but force someone somewhere to at least see my name flash before their tired little eyes before they glaze over for good, leading them to throw the rest of the entries in the recycling bin and name their cousin the winner?

I do remember overhearing one rather distinguished comp professor say that students should enter as many contests as they feel inclined to because only good things can come of it. Well, kind of. That's only if your magnum opus actually gets out of the damn neighborhood post office. I would normally say that it's always worth it for me to enter these things. I'm very competitive by nature; the satisfaction from winning (it has happened a couple of times somehow or another) is too much fun, while being pissed off at not winning gets me about as motivated to write as ever (sad but true). But having my entry lost in the mail? That pisses me off in a much more counterproductive way, the way that makes me not want to even bother sending the damn thing again even if there's still plenty of time. "It probably sucks anyway," or "I'll bet everyone entering is out of my league" are among the thoughts crossing my mind. Of course, I will do it one way or the other just so that I can look forward to being doubly pissed of when I don't win jack, or going totally ape shit when I'm crowned the winner.

BUT...if they lose my stuff again, expect the next entry to be a Cage-inspired work for fist and postal employee that will get more performances than any previous work of mine. Anyone know of contests for works that eventually land the composer in jail?

(If there's one thing I've learned from communicating via the internet, it's that thanks to the few of you out there who are argumentative literal minded dopes, I ought to say overtly that the last two sentences constitute a classic example of sarcasm, a time-honored literary device that is easily lost over a computer screen. In other words, it was a joke guys; you can't sue me. But seriously, if you know of a comp contest for that kind of thing...)

Orchestral Excerpt = Poorly Orchestrated?

Allow me to reflect on my most recent yet only marginally successful attempts to hack through a few of the orchestral excerpts I've been putting off learning for, oh, let's see here, my entire existence:

I've heard it said about orchestral excerpts for tuba that either anyone can play them or no one can play them. It's funny because its true. What does it mean when something that "anyone can play" (mind you I am talking figuratively here) has become a standard excerpt? Most typically, it's because it's important thematically AND it's famous. The Meistersinger excerpt would be exhibit A; not the most demanding thing in the world, but where else in the entire repertoire (let alone in such a famous piece) does the tuba play the entire tune?

On the other hand, the mechanism by which an excerpt from a more obscure piece becomes a staple of the audition circuit should serve as a warning to all of us wannabe composers. The only way an excerpt from a second rate piece becomes standard is if it's so hard that even the best orchestral players in the world have to practice it for years to get it right. In other words, such excerpts represent things you really shouldn't write (or at least not with the expectation of it being played correctly by mortals).

Now comes the part where I get to whine (eat your hearts out, singers). Want to know how NOT to write for tuba? Just take a look at the Fountains of Rome excerpt. If an undergraduate comp student brought something like that to their lesson, they'd be buried beneath a heap of the usual criticisms. (although come to think of it, I can't say it's not idiomatic; I guess that makes it more "idealistic" than "unrealistic?" It's damn near impossible to play in any case.)

As of today, my new goal as an orchestral composer is that if in the unlikely event anything I ever write gets called on an audition, that it be for the first reason and not the second reason (i.e. because it's famous and catchy, NOT because only 1% of everyone ever to play that instrument can even imagine making it happen). Meanwhile, pardon the clatter while I continue to fluff and cack my way through Fountains a la the other 99%

Some Housekeeping

By popular demand, I've added links to some of my music. Be nice. I regret that I do not currently have a decent recording of an entire "classical" composition to share with y'all. I think I will work on doing something with MIDI. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for all that jazz and the finale of my trumpet sonata.

Also, I have enabled comment moderation with hopes of alleviating the spam comments I've been receiving lately. To the spammers: my you-know-what works just fine, thank you.

Perfunctory Holiday Wishes

Merry Christmakwanzaakah to all you brass types out there:

click here

My Ongoing Adversarial Relationship With The Act of Revision (particularly as manifested in my "classical" compositions)

As listeners, we often experience the phenomenon of a piece "growing" on us. It is not an unusual occurrence, but what if the piece is one that you wrote yourself? This would seem on the surface to be an almost impossible situation; don't you "know" the piece better than anyone else if you wrote it? Maybe it is a natural consequence of what some would see as the inherent flaws in my autodidactic approach to composition, but my own pieces often grow on me. I think I know the reason: I often make compositional choices (i.e. note choices) based on some kind of gut feeling of necessity that I cannot really explain at the time. At the immediate completion of the piece, I hear the awkwardness and almost want to change it, but I can rack my brains for hours finding an array of "satisfactory" solutions only to discard them all in favor of the original "flawed" version. Something always tells me not to change it. I recently listened back to a piece I had nearly forgotten about that has several such moments; I liked most of them and didn't like some of them, but most of all, I still cannot fathom changing anything in it. It seems to me that the rhetoric of contemporary composition pedagogy is one of striving for an odd ideal of perfection; not perfection in the abstract, but some kind of relative perfection, the best you can possibly do under the circumstances as determined not by you yourself but by your teacher and peers. I used the word "choice" earlier, but actually, come to think of it, what I'm getting at is that these things are not choices at all but inevitabilities; isn't that called having a strong vision or personal voice or one of those other press release buzzwords? According to the 60 Minutes story, the sole kink in the armor of whiz kid Jay Greenberg is an even stronger aversion to revision than what I'm describing. Perhaps a baseball analogy would be appropriate here: when Twins manager Ron Gardenhire was asked when phenom Joe Mauer would start hitting for power, he replied that he was not going to be the one to mess up Mauer's swing by telling him to hit the ball out of the park all the time. Anyone who followed the Twins regular season surge last season can see that Gardy knows what he's talking about.