I'm happy to be included in writer Pamela Espeland's "Conversations on Improvisation" series at mnartists.org.
Click here to read the interview.
05 June 2010
02 June 2010
20 May 2010
C.o.S.T.
The acronym stands for "Consortium of Symphonic Transients." It refers to a large ensemble project I started last year to provide a more vital and sustainable medium for symphonic music than those which presently exist for those of us without a major orchestra gig or international composing career. Much to my surprise, the idea is proving mildly attractive to a few people besides myself. It's even gotten me my first grant, from the American Composers Forum nonetheless, which, more significantly, also marks the first recognition of my existence by anyone who writes the word "Composer" using a capital-C. Thanks to this modest sum of money, we're holding several rehearsals and two concerts in a wonderful performance space in St. Paul called Studio Z. In addition to a healthy dose of my music, I've incited 5 other players in the group to contribute music for us to play and interspersed it with my own to create a co-composed symphony of sorts which we will perform without pause as if it were a single work. I couldn't be more excited for this project, not least because it has led me to realize quite a bit about myself, my work, and what direction I want to go in, and as any good blogger would, I thought it might be worth sharing some of that with the wider world.
The general dearth of large ensembles in my musical circles, my inability to get meaningful performances or even readings of my large ensemble music, and self-awareness of my own artistic wants and needs all played a part in my decision to initiate a large ensemble project. However, it was an exchange with a student of mine which really lit a fire under me to pursue such a thing, an exchange which I would not initially have expected to have such a profound effect on my performing and composing lives, but of course, anyone who teaches knows that you frequently learn as much from your students as they do from you. I chronicled these events in this very space at the time, so I won't retell the whole story, but in a nutshell, this tuba student had come to me over the summer specifically to study jazz only to be told the ensuing fall by his band teacher that he wouldn't be allowed to play in the jazz band because, well...because tubas do not play in jazz bands.
For obvious reasons, that hit a nerve with me, resulting rather directly in the documents linked to above. However, it took a little longer for the larger epiphany to reveal itself: what if I put my money where my mouth is by writing music and starting a group where the instrumentation was flexible? This way, membership in the ensemble could be based more on musicianship and less on instrumentation. Contrast that with the orchestral world, where there are 20 violins and only one (maybe one) tuba player employed by each group. You could be the second best tuba player in town and not have shit to do. Or, consider the jazz world, where piano trios can get hired to play just about anywhere for anyone, but a sextet with 3 horns is too big, loud, rehearsal-intensive and costly to find its way into much of anything but the occasional club date. Rhythm section players have the horn players by the balls, since a rhythm section is a band unto itself and any horn players added to it are just extra mouths to feed and parts to extract.
In light of these sorts of considerations, it seemed to me that a large ensemble of flexible instrumentation could be a very powerful antidote to many unfortunate situations that I and many around me frequently find ourselves in. If someone is a good musician with something to offer the group, they should be in, and if not, they shouldn't. If they have a conflict with a gig, they don't play on that gig, and there are no hard feelings; no scrambling for subs at the last minute, no hiring subpar players because they are the only ones available on that instrument for that price, and no heightening jealousy when a band member becomes successful as part of another outfit and begins having scheduling conflicts. A group with open instrumentation can draw more loosely on a large pool of players rather than requiring every one of them to be present at each and every event, which mitigates the primary obstacle to maintaining a large ensemble project comprised mostly of freelancers.
These are the practical considerations, and they are very powerful. For many people, however, I suspect that the artistic considerations dictated by these practical considerations would serve as significant deterrents to such a project. For whatever reason, though, the more I began to ponder the artistic consequences of this sort of "transient" ensemble structure, the more I liked them. And if you're thinking this is going the direction of "I Can't Believe It's Not Music," graphic notation, prose scores and the like, think again. Indeed, that area is probably the more vital one as far as open instrumentation pieces go, and one day, I'll start a project to explore that territory; that day, however, has not yet arrived. I'm unashamed to state matter of factly that my aspirations for this project are not nearly that ambitious. It is symptomatic of just how bad things are around here that my less exciting alternative is actually quite exciting, to myself and others. I hope that one day it is rendered unspeakably boring by a plethora of similarly constituted ensembles covering much of the same ground with greater elegance and aplomb than I've managed, but until that happens, I reserve the right to inhabit this more conservative musical space without trepidation or shame.
The cornerstone of my overall concept for this group is to apply the chorus effect to heterogeneous groups of wind instruments. Once I had committed myself to pursuing the flexible instrumentation concept, I began writing pieces where each part was conceived for a general range and character of instrument rather than for a specific instrument. I created two templates for this approach, both for winds and percussion with optional string doubling of the wind parts. One is 8-part (7 horns, 1 percussion), the other 10-part (4 brass, 4 winds, basses, and drum set) with an optional second drum set/percussion part. They are given below:
I had years earlier begun composing untitled "series" of compositions to be played in any complete or partial order, all for solo tuba and some accompanying ensemble. I labeled these series with letters to correspond to the accompanying ensemble, as in The "A" Series for Tuba and Acoustic Jazz Trio, The "B" Series for Tuba and Brass Quartet, and The "C" Series for Tuba and Chamber Orchestra. Though the flexible instrumentation pieces would not be conceived to feature me as a soloist, I nonetheless had become attached to the idea of untitled movements which could be recombined in many different orders and wanted to apply it to this project, so I gave the new series the arbitrary letter names "D" and "F" respectively.
Obviously, a general division of labor between high, mid and low is still necessary; the instrumentation of these pieces is not truly "open" in the sense that any instrument can play any part in any octave, but it is tremendously flexible even so. This, of course, constitutes a near complete rejection of timbre as a compositional device, since I have no idea which instruments might actually end up playing the parts, or how much doubling there will be. I imagine this is an unthinkable compromise to many otherwise like-minded composers, but not for me. While the art and craft of orchestration is not entirely lost on me, my affinities for harmony, rhythm and counterpoint so outweigh those for the means with which they might be realized as to render timbre a moot point in much of my symphonic music. (Paradoxically, I feel less so about my chamber music, where the timbral palette is, by definition, smaller). I simply don't regard timbre with the preciousness or sentimentality it is typically accorded elsewhere, which means I'm not doing myself any favors by writing elaborately and specifically scored music that could only be performed by a professional symphony orchestra, and hence, which I'll probably never hear. I've written in that vein before, and I've got plenty of those pieces in me yet, but I'm quite content to write for unspecified forces as well; in fact, I'm finding it strangely gratifying and even liberating to do so.
In a traditional symphony orchestra, woodwind, brass and percussion parts are performed strictly by single players, as opposed to the string parts, which are performed strictly by groups of like string instruments playing in unison most of the time. Remove the strings entirely and add a very few doublings on instruments like clarinet and tuba and you have what is typically referred to as a "Wind Ensemble," essentially collection of wind soloists with a few strategic additions to assist with balance. It is only in the "Concert Band" or "Symphonic Band" that significant doubling of woodwind and brass parts is commonplace, and even then, this is done exclusively with like instruments; one does not normally hand the same part to the Bb clarinet, Bb trumpet and Bb soprano saxophone players, even though those parts are written in the same transposition and the instruments' ranges overlap substantially. Of course, the symphonic band paradigm is the predominant medium for K-12 instrumental music education in the U.S.; it's the one I came up in, and let's just say it left its mark. My first experience playing in a 120-piece symphonic band, with 8 tubas, 12 trumpets, countless clarinets, and so on, is something that will always be with me. Much as I grew impatient with it through compulsory participation, the further I get from those experiences, the fonder I become of them and the clearer their influence becomes.
My earliest compositions were written for 2-part and 4-part templates. Some time early in high school, I settled on an 8-part template not too terribly different from the D Series template above, and in fact, the similarities between them are not entirely coincidental. To this day, I suspect I wrote far more music in high school for that silly 8-part template than I have since written for any other instrumental configuration. It certainly was a medium which suited my technical and expressive needs exceptionally well at the time: I wrote nearly exclusively for it for several years, resulting in dozens of good-for-my-age pieces which I wouldn't necessarily want my name attached to now. What has become more apparent only recently is that despite its obvious limitations, this sort of thing still suits me rather well, and I've embarked on this project not only well aware of the similarities to my adolescent years, but in fact embracing those similarities in hopes of recapturing some of the naive excitement of that time of my life, which, as most anyone reading this probably knows, can be difficult for us "professionals" to hang on to.
I always envisioned the high school pieces as large ensemble music (i.e. for the school bands I was in), but the template was more an octet than a symphony. Each of the 8 parts was designated as a unique instrument with no multiples, and I gave little serious thought to the fact (which I was by then aware of) that a "real" band score would call for multiples of most of the instruments I had used. This is not to say, though, that I hadn't planned for certain possibilities, especially when it came to instruments I had altogether excluded; I envisioned horns, for example, doubling the alto sax part, and composed with this in mind even though "horn" was nowhere to be found at the left margin of my scores. In this way, there are further similarities with the current project, where parts are conceived to accommodate substantial doubling by any combination of 5-6 different instruments, and in a way, the practical considerations that led to this decision were also similar: my high school band had only one hornist and one trombonist, so writing full band scores with 4 unique horn parts and 3 unique trombone parts seemed foolish to me at the time. Similarly, I don't work with very many flute players these days, but Part 1 in the D Series can also be covered by clarinet, oboe, soprano sax, violin, guitar, and probably more I haven't thought of because necessity has not yet intervened, and so the group is able to function without a stalwart flutist even though I envision Part 1 most essentially as a flute part (indicated by "Flute" appearing at the top of the list of possible instruments for this part).
The large ensemble music I wrote late in college and immediately after college differs substantially from that which I wrote in high school in that (1) it is scored far more conventionally, (2) I'm not ashamed of all of it, and most importantly, (3) none of it has ever so much as sniffed a performance. The elaborate specialization of function among the instruments in a traditionally scored orchestra or band piece is a substantial obstacle to getting the piece performed, since you need access to an orchestra or band that is comprised of precisely those instruments in precisely those proportions. The 8-part pieces I wrote in high school were eminently more adaptable in that, while I had specific instruments in mind for each part, I knew that the ranges for the parts I had written closely resembled those of many instruments I hadn't, and had planned from the outset that the scarce instruments (should they miraculously appear) would simply double existing parts. Even so, their absence would not pose an insurmountable obstacle to performing the piece; that's the key ingredient that I've appropriated to C.o.S.T.
Ten years, hundreds of compositions and one college degree later, I find myself consciously emulating my high school self. In every other respect, you couldn't pay me enough to go back to being in high school, but perhaps I actually did stumble on something worthwhile back then without knowing it and have just now figured it out. It was inevitable at that time that I would outgrow the 8-part template and feel the need to explore a broader symphonic palette, but while those explorations have certainly been fruitful, in the end they've mostly helped me realize how content I actually can be with a more limited template where the specific instruments (timbres, that is) aren't specified. It is precisely because this approach so closely resembles that of not just my high school self but of many naive high school age composers that I'm just a tad insecure about putting it in front of capital-C Composers, who at first blush would be likely to see only arrested compositional development. Without being privy to the intervening 10 years or so of experimentation with more elaborate scoring and the subsequent realization that, while it's nice, it's not always absolutely necessary, it's not likely that anyone interested in upholding The Profession would find this approach compelling. However, as you've probably guessed from all this self-indulgent verbiage, I do. Don't take my word for it, though; better to hear for yourself.
The general dearth of large ensembles in my musical circles, my inability to get meaningful performances or even readings of my large ensemble music, and self-awareness of my own artistic wants and needs all played a part in my decision to initiate a large ensemble project. However, it was an exchange with a student of mine which really lit a fire under me to pursue such a thing, an exchange which I would not initially have expected to have such a profound effect on my performing and composing lives, but of course, anyone who teaches knows that you frequently learn as much from your students as they do from you. I chronicled these events in this very space at the time, so I won't retell the whole story, but in a nutshell, this tuba student had come to me over the summer specifically to study jazz only to be told the ensuing fall by his band teacher that he wouldn't be allowed to play in the jazz band because, well...because tubas do not play in jazz bands.
For obvious reasons, that hit a nerve with me, resulting rather directly in the documents linked to above. However, it took a little longer for the larger epiphany to reveal itself: what if I put my money where my mouth is by writing music and starting a group where the instrumentation was flexible? This way, membership in the ensemble could be based more on musicianship and less on instrumentation. Contrast that with the orchestral world, where there are 20 violins and only one (maybe one) tuba player employed by each group. You could be the second best tuba player in town and not have shit to do. Or, consider the jazz world, where piano trios can get hired to play just about anywhere for anyone, but a sextet with 3 horns is too big, loud, rehearsal-intensive and costly to find its way into much of anything but the occasional club date. Rhythm section players have the horn players by the balls, since a rhythm section is a band unto itself and any horn players added to it are just extra mouths to feed and parts to extract.
In light of these sorts of considerations, it seemed to me that a large ensemble of flexible instrumentation could be a very powerful antidote to many unfortunate situations that I and many around me frequently find ourselves in. If someone is a good musician with something to offer the group, they should be in, and if not, they shouldn't. If they have a conflict with a gig, they don't play on that gig, and there are no hard feelings; no scrambling for subs at the last minute, no hiring subpar players because they are the only ones available on that instrument for that price, and no heightening jealousy when a band member becomes successful as part of another outfit and begins having scheduling conflicts. A group with open instrumentation can draw more loosely on a large pool of players rather than requiring every one of them to be present at each and every event, which mitigates the primary obstacle to maintaining a large ensemble project comprised mostly of freelancers.
These are the practical considerations, and they are very powerful. For many people, however, I suspect that the artistic considerations dictated by these practical considerations would serve as significant deterrents to such a project. For whatever reason, though, the more I began to ponder the artistic consequences of this sort of "transient" ensemble structure, the more I liked them. And if you're thinking this is going the direction of "I Can't Believe It's Not Music," graphic notation, prose scores and the like, think again. Indeed, that area is probably the more vital one as far as open instrumentation pieces go, and one day, I'll start a project to explore that territory; that day, however, has not yet arrived. I'm unashamed to state matter of factly that my aspirations for this project are not nearly that ambitious. It is symptomatic of just how bad things are around here that my less exciting alternative is actually quite exciting, to myself and others. I hope that one day it is rendered unspeakably boring by a plethora of similarly constituted ensembles covering much of the same ground with greater elegance and aplomb than I've managed, but until that happens, I reserve the right to inhabit this more conservative musical space without trepidation or shame.
The cornerstone of my overall concept for this group is to apply the chorus effect to heterogeneous groups of wind instruments. Once I had committed myself to pursuing the flexible instrumentation concept, I began writing pieces where each part was conceived for a general range and character of instrument rather than for a specific instrument. I created two templates for this approach, both for winds and percussion with optional string doubling of the wind parts. One is 8-part (7 horns, 1 percussion), the other 10-part (4 brass, 4 winds, basses, and drum set) with an optional second drum set/percussion part. They are given below:
I had years earlier begun composing untitled "series" of compositions to be played in any complete or partial order, all for solo tuba and some accompanying ensemble. I labeled these series with letters to correspond to the accompanying ensemble, as in The "A" Series for Tuba and Acoustic Jazz Trio, The "B" Series for Tuba and Brass Quartet, and The "C" Series for Tuba and Chamber Orchestra. Though the flexible instrumentation pieces would not be conceived to feature me as a soloist, I nonetheless had become attached to the idea of untitled movements which could be recombined in many different orders and wanted to apply it to this project, so I gave the new series the arbitrary letter names "D" and "F" respectively.
Obviously, a general division of labor between high, mid and low is still necessary; the instrumentation of these pieces is not truly "open" in the sense that any instrument can play any part in any octave, but it is tremendously flexible even so. This, of course, constitutes a near complete rejection of timbre as a compositional device, since I have no idea which instruments might actually end up playing the parts, or how much doubling there will be. I imagine this is an unthinkable compromise to many otherwise like-minded composers, but not for me. While the art and craft of orchestration is not entirely lost on me, my affinities for harmony, rhythm and counterpoint so outweigh those for the means with which they might be realized as to render timbre a moot point in much of my symphonic music. (Paradoxically, I feel less so about my chamber music, where the timbral palette is, by definition, smaller). I simply don't regard timbre with the preciousness or sentimentality it is typically accorded elsewhere, which means I'm not doing myself any favors by writing elaborately and specifically scored music that could only be performed by a professional symphony orchestra, and hence, which I'll probably never hear. I've written in that vein before, and I've got plenty of those pieces in me yet, but I'm quite content to write for unspecified forces as well; in fact, I'm finding it strangely gratifying and even liberating to do so.
In a traditional symphony orchestra, woodwind, brass and percussion parts are performed strictly by single players, as opposed to the string parts, which are performed strictly by groups of like string instruments playing in unison most of the time. Remove the strings entirely and add a very few doublings on instruments like clarinet and tuba and you have what is typically referred to as a "Wind Ensemble," essentially collection of wind soloists with a few strategic additions to assist with balance. It is only in the "Concert Band" or "Symphonic Band" that significant doubling of woodwind and brass parts is commonplace, and even then, this is done exclusively with like instruments; one does not normally hand the same part to the Bb clarinet, Bb trumpet and Bb soprano saxophone players, even though those parts are written in the same transposition and the instruments' ranges overlap substantially. Of course, the symphonic band paradigm is the predominant medium for K-12 instrumental music education in the U.S.; it's the one I came up in, and let's just say it left its mark. My first experience playing in a 120-piece symphonic band, with 8 tubas, 12 trumpets, countless clarinets, and so on, is something that will always be with me. Much as I grew impatient with it through compulsory participation, the further I get from those experiences, the fonder I become of them and the clearer their influence becomes.
My earliest compositions were written for 2-part and 4-part templates. Some time early in high school, I settled on an 8-part template not too terribly different from the D Series template above, and in fact, the similarities between them are not entirely coincidental. To this day, I suspect I wrote far more music in high school for that silly 8-part template than I have since written for any other instrumental configuration. It certainly was a medium which suited my technical and expressive needs exceptionally well at the time: I wrote nearly exclusively for it for several years, resulting in dozens of good-for-my-age pieces which I wouldn't necessarily want my name attached to now. What has become more apparent only recently is that despite its obvious limitations, this sort of thing still suits me rather well, and I've embarked on this project not only well aware of the similarities to my adolescent years, but in fact embracing those similarities in hopes of recapturing some of the naive excitement of that time of my life, which, as most anyone reading this probably knows, can be difficult for us "professionals" to hang on to.
I always envisioned the high school pieces as large ensemble music (i.e. for the school bands I was in), but the template was more an octet than a symphony. Each of the 8 parts was designated as a unique instrument with no multiples, and I gave little serious thought to the fact (which I was by then aware of) that a "real" band score would call for multiples of most of the instruments I had used. This is not to say, though, that I hadn't planned for certain possibilities, especially when it came to instruments I had altogether excluded; I envisioned horns, for example, doubling the alto sax part, and composed with this in mind even though "horn" was nowhere to be found at the left margin of my scores. In this way, there are further similarities with the current project, where parts are conceived to accommodate substantial doubling by any combination of 5-6 different instruments, and in a way, the practical considerations that led to this decision were also similar: my high school band had only one hornist and one trombonist, so writing full band scores with 4 unique horn parts and 3 unique trombone parts seemed foolish to me at the time. Similarly, I don't work with very many flute players these days, but Part 1 in the D Series can also be covered by clarinet, oboe, soprano sax, violin, guitar, and probably more I haven't thought of because necessity has not yet intervened, and so the group is able to function without a stalwart flutist even though I envision Part 1 most essentially as a flute part (indicated by "Flute" appearing at the top of the list of possible instruments for this part).
The large ensemble music I wrote late in college and immediately after college differs substantially from that which I wrote in high school in that (1) it is scored far more conventionally, (2) I'm not ashamed of all of it, and most importantly, (3) none of it has ever so much as sniffed a performance. The elaborate specialization of function among the instruments in a traditionally scored orchestra or band piece is a substantial obstacle to getting the piece performed, since you need access to an orchestra or band that is comprised of precisely those instruments in precisely those proportions. The 8-part pieces I wrote in high school were eminently more adaptable in that, while I had specific instruments in mind for each part, I knew that the ranges for the parts I had written closely resembled those of many instruments I hadn't, and had planned from the outset that the scarce instruments (should they miraculously appear) would simply double existing parts. Even so, their absence would not pose an insurmountable obstacle to performing the piece; that's the key ingredient that I've appropriated to C.o.S.T.
Ten years, hundreds of compositions and one college degree later, I find myself consciously emulating my high school self. In every other respect, you couldn't pay me enough to go back to being in high school, but perhaps I actually did stumble on something worthwhile back then without knowing it and have just now figured it out. It was inevitable at that time that I would outgrow the 8-part template and feel the need to explore a broader symphonic palette, but while those explorations have certainly been fruitful, in the end they've mostly helped me realize how content I actually can be with a more limited template where the specific instruments (timbres, that is) aren't specified. It is precisely because this approach so closely resembles that of not just my high school self but of many naive high school age composers that I'm just a tad insecure about putting it in front of capital-C Composers, who at first blush would be likely to see only arrested compositional development. Without being privy to the intervening 10 years or so of experimentation with more elaborate scoring and the subsequent realization that, while it's nice, it's not always absolutely necessary, it's not likely that anyone interested in upholding The Profession would find this approach compelling. However, as you've probably guessed from all this self-indulgent verbiage, I do. Don't take my word for it, though; better to hear for yourself.
04 April 2010
Behold Lala
I can't even remember how it happened, but a few months ago, I stumbled on a digital music vendor called Lala. Since then, I've mentioned it to several colleagues, a few of whom had heard of it, none of whom had used it. Here, then, is my totally unpaid and relatively uninformed endorsement for the site.
The primary difference between Lala and every other digital music vendor and internet radio outlet I'm familiar with is that registered users can listen to complete tracks once before purchasing. I'll say that again: you get to listen to the whole entire track without paying anything. This is very much unlike iTunes, for example, where you get lame 30 second tidbits that are useless for taking shots in the dark, and preclude forming even the seed of an opinion. It is also unlike Pandora, where one cannot choose to listen to anything in particular, but rather is at the mercy of their supposedly mind-reading algorithms (albeit ones that I found made the service both useful and effective for my purposes, and at the unbeatable price of free). In many ways, it even trumps YouTube, which I regularly extoll to my students as perhaps the most powerful and important listening resource available to them these days, yet which exists as such only to the extent that users are able to fool, hide from, litigate against, or publicly humiliate intellectual property rights holders who otherwise might (justly or unjustly) want the content they control to be removed.
Apparently, everything that is available for "web listening" on Lala has been licensed, how I can't imagine, but I'm not going to worry about it unless it suddenly goes up in smoke, in which case I'll wish I'd paid better attention, and also that I was a lawyer. There is also much listed which has apparently not (yet) been licensed as such and hence is not available for the one-shot free listen, as well as much that is simply indexed with no actual files available to purchase or listen to at all. And of course, there's plenty of stuff people like me consider interesting that is totally absent, but this time around, that's a small complaint; this site already offers instant free access to a lifetime's worth of music.
Why would I take the time to write about this? First off, don't you think it's just about fucking time that the customer should be able to listen to complete tracks before purchasing? Isn't it totally fucking annoying that enabling this would verge on a revolutionary act? Even 1 or 2 minute long samples are totally worthless when trying to choose a recording of an epic classical symphony movement, or in evaluating a piece of free improvisation that fills an entire disc. It's like trying to buy a bike but only being allowed to see the handlebars. Conversely, if what Lala has accomplished catches on (and why woudn't it?), no future site will be able to compete without offering at least the same perusal privileges to its users, or maybe even without upping the ante. That's huge.
The bike/handlebar analogy is a relatively objective and airtight way of arguing for the absolute necessity of what the good people at Lala have accomplished for music and musicians, but don't think that I, in my own totally subjective and perversely pseudo-academic crusade against shallow listening, don't also just love the fact that, if not only in theory, this is a system which privileges deep, engaging, radical music that simply demands repeated auditions in order to be fully absorbed over saccharine ear candy that one might not feel absolutely necessitates a second hearing. In practice, of course, I doubt that this will bring about a true flipping of the scales where abstract modern classical composers become rich and famous on account of their brisk MP3 sales while hustling pop musicians are forced to cobble together a living from studio teaching and session work because everyone can hear their songs once for free and simply decide it's not necessary to hear them again if that privilege is going to carry an 89¢ price tag. Even so, know that I'll be faithfully doing my part to see that plan through. From now on, when professional obligation or peer pressure begets perfunctory curiosity about something I know I won't be able to stand hearing more than once anyway, I can scratch that itch without having to pay for it. Meanwhile, I can also investigate things I suspect may be of deeper interest to me, hear the entire works, purchase only those which simply demand to be purchased, and know that I'm not just throwing money down the drain. And of course, true shots in the dark can and will be taken. That's probably the most exciting part, and something that desperately needs to be encouraged and enabled among occupants of the teetotalling modern day pop-cultural mainstream. How about it y'all? I'll show you mine if you show me yours...
As you can see, I can hardly contain my optimism about this state of affairs, but the downside to all of this (if there is one) is that it has swiftly brought about the inevitable conclusion of an otherwise very slowly evolving process in my listening habits, and I've been left just a bit shell-shocked as a result. When I first got serious about music towards the end of high school, I also got incredibly methodical about listening, perhaps even a bit too much so. Part of that was attributable to economics: CD's cost between $5 and $15 each back then, and I was earning $7.50 an hour working just a couple shifts a week in a bagel shop. Hence, I had to get the most out of my purchases, and would seldom acquire new discs until I simply could not stand to listen to the old ones any longer. This was not, however, entirely a money issue. I also decided that it was more useful to me as a developing composer and improvisor to know a little bit of music really well rather than to simply listen superficially to as much unique work as I could get my hands on. And as all of this threatened to severely limit breadth, I seldom allowed myself to purchase more than one disc by the same artist. Put into terms I did not possess at that time, what I sought to do was to assemble collection of major works, each of which was more of less representative of its creator's overall work, and to get to know each of them inside and out.
While colleagues and teachers have gently taken me to task since on each of these counts, I wouldn't do anything differently if I had it to do over again. No amount of stylistic breadth was truly feasible in that timeframe that would have satisfied everyone around me, nor myself, but I made surprisingly good decisions for my age, as well as some curious ones the lasting impact of which I'm only now beginning to understand, but which I don't regret one bit, since if anything, they've made me more unique (and I can say with a straight face that it was on purpose). The fact that I dwelled forever on a disc before moving on to the next one sometimes made me feel uncool, since others my age began to significantly outpace me in terms of breadth, and yet the fact that I could hum my way through a dozen complete Eric Dolphy solos before I had so much as smelled the level of technical proficiency required to execute them on tuba allowed me to reach that level sooner than I would have otherwise, dare I say sooner also than many who spent more of their practice time listening to records than actually practicing.
As my collection grew and I became aware of more and more music, my listening patterns gradually started to shift. As I've written before, this is part of the reason my overall listening decreased quite markedly between about 2004 and 2007 (late in college and immediately after graduation): because there was now so much more to get to, I spent less time on everything, and because I spent less time on everything, I developed shallower relationships with that music, both emotionally and technically. I went through a withdrawal of sorts, having become addicted to the naive and single-minded excitement that accompanied my initial exposure to so many of my early purchases. This sort of intense attachment developed less and less from my newer acquisitions either because I chose them out of mere professional obligation, or because the overall thrill of listening records was lessened by the fact that it was no longer a new discovery, but rather an addiction of sorts that cost money and begot plenty of interpersonal conflict, just like real drugs do.
Long story longer, Lala has rousted me from these doldrums and thrown me headlong into shallower, "survey" listening that is intensely exciting simply because it's a new way of doing things, but also because I sense the opportunity to finally start balancing out those several years where I embraced depth over breadth. I now spend most all of my listening time on Lala investigating things I'm curious about for some reason or another, knowing from the start that I have only one chance to listen for free. Ultimately, I know from experience that without returning at some point to the kind of deeper, repeated listening that begets memorization and occasionally even obsession, my true "knowledge" of music will stagnate and my creative well will begin to run dry. However, as you could have guessed from the story I just told, there are some fairly significant holes not just in my pantheon of favorites, but indeed in my overall experience as well. Lala is giving me a chance to remedy that, a chance that I never anticipated having, or, in some ways, even wanting. However, now that something has restored the naive, child-like excitement of my earliest days of "serious" musicianship, I'm inclined to ride that wave of excitement, hopefully all the way to the kind of comprehensive bird's eye view of recorded music history that I haven't allowed myself to develop previously. That can't possibly be a bad thing.
There's a social networking component to Lala, which is equal parts annoying and seductive. You can officially "follow" other listeners Twitter-style, or just visit their home pages where their supposed listening habits are on display. Every album is categorized according to genre, and your home page generates a bar graph to represent your tendencies. The assumption that the total quantity of tracks heard from an arbitrarily assigned (and often flat out misapplied) genre equates directly to a preference for that genre is an unfortunate pop culture holdover; making the same assumption about repeated listening is a bit safer, but not safe enough. Everything on the Tzadik label is considered "Rock," including some recent Wadada Leo Smith records that belie that categorization just a bit. Meanwhile, Univers Zero is egregiously labeled "Pop," Elmo Hope "Classical," and Monk's records seem to move up the food chain from "Jazz" to "Rock" to "Pop" based on how well they've sold.
In light of all of this, and also fearing that my, ahem, purely investigative forays into much music I can't stand could possibly reflect badly on my reputation among like minded colleagues (yes, both of them), I've forgone linking my Facebook account with Lala, which is an option that would have saved me the trouble of registering with yet another site, but which ultimately was less attractive for its potential to blow my cover. Hence, in order to find out what I'm up to, you'll have to know where to look, and I'm not going to tell you, though I'll give you a hint and say that if you don't recognize both the pseudonym and the photo, then you really ought to hang out here more often. I'm disappointed to find that the listening history apparently begins to purge itself after a couple of months. That's the one feature of the home page that I found essential, not to mention intriguing from a "digital remains" standpoint; imagine 22nd century musicologists settling the issue of whether a dead composer knew this or that piece by an obscure contemporary only after convincing his widow to log them into his Lala account. Of course, in enforcement of the "One Free Listen" policy, the complete history is indeed stored somewhere, even if it's not publicly visible, and this further begs the question of why it would be too much trouble to display it on the home page.
I'm too enamored with the product as well as with my newfound freedom to attempt to circumvent the limitations on free listening by simply creating a million accounts. In fact, taking into account the multiple recordings of major classical works that are available, as well as a few jazz albums which have been reissued and repackaged over the years, there are actually plenty of opportunities to hear a piece multiple times while remaining firmly within the confines of ethical behavior (I managed to find 10 versions of Stravinsky's "Symphonies of Wind Instruments," a piece my college wind ensemble played once, but which I wasn't assigned to; I wish I had been). I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I haven't purchased anything yet, and if they go belly up before I do, I'll feel lame about it. Speaking strictly about the product, though (I know nothing of their business practices) and what it does to the landscape of online listening, it seems like just the kind of operation worth supporting, while the soundbite boutiques and aspiring mind-readers seem less and less so. If anyone I've mentioned it to in person had ever used it, I wouldn't have bothered giving it so much airtime here.
The primary difference between Lala and every other digital music vendor and internet radio outlet I'm familiar with is that registered users can listen to complete tracks once before purchasing. I'll say that again: you get to listen to the whole entire track without paying anything. This is very much unlike iTunes, for example, where you get lame 30 second tidbits that are useless for taking shots in the dark, and preclude forming even the seed of an opinion. It is also unlike Pandora, where one cannot choose to listen to anything in particular, but rather is at the mercy of their supposedly mind-reading algorithms (albeit ones that I found made the service both useful and effective for my purposes, and at the unbeatable price of free). In many ways, it even trumps YouTube, which I regularly extoll to my students as perhaps the most powerful and important listening resource available to them these days, yet which exists as such only to the extent that users are able to fool, hide from, litigate against, or publicly humiliate intellectual property rights holders who otherwise might (justly or unjustly) want the content they control to be removed.
Apparently, everything that is available for "web listening" on Lala has been licensed, how I can't imagine, but I'm not going to worry about it unless it suddenly goes up in smoke, in which case I'll wish I'd paid better attention, and also that I was a lawyer. There is also much listed which has apparently not (yet) been licensed as such and hence is not available for the one-shot free listen, as well as much that is simply indexed with no actual files available to purchase or listen to at all. And of course, there's plenty of stuff people like me consider interesting that is totally absent, but this time around, that's a small complaint; this site already offers instant free access to a lifetime's worth of music.
Why would I take the time to write about this? First off, don't you think it's just about fucking time that the customer should be able to listen to complete tracks before purchasing? Isn't it totally fucking annoying that enabling this would verge on a revolutionary act? Even 1 or 2 minute long samples are totally worthless when trying to choose a recording of an epic classical symphony movement, or in evaluating a piece of free improvisation that fills an entire disc. It's like trying to buy a bike but only being allowed to see the handlebars. Conversely, if what Lala has accomplished catches on (and why woudn't it?), no future site will be able to compete without offering at least the same perusal privileges to its users, or maybe even without upping the ante. That's huge.
The bike/handlebar analogy is a relatively objective and airtight way of arguing for the absolute necessity of what the good people at Lala have accomplished for music and musicians, but don't think that I, in my own totally subjective and perversely pseudo-academic crusade against shallow listening, don't also just love the fact that, if not only in theory, this is a system which privileges deep, engaging, radical music that simply demands repeated auditions in order to be fully absorbed over saccharine ear candy that one might not feel absolutely necessitates a second hearing. In practice, of course, I doubt that this will bring about a true flipping of the scales where abstract modern classical composers become rich and famous on account of their brisk MP3 sales while hustling pop musicians are forced to cobble together a living from studio teaching and session work because everyone can hear their songs once for free and simply decide it's not necessary to hear them again if that privilege is going to carry an 89¢ price tag. Even so, know that I'll be faithfully doing my part to see that plan through. From now on, when professional obligation or peer pressure begets perfunctory curiosity about something I know I won't be able to stand hearing more than once anyway, I can scratch that itch without having to pay for it. Meanwhile, I can also investigate things I suspect may be of deeper interest to me, hear the entire works, purchase only those which simply demand to be purchased, and know that I'm not just throwing money down the drain. And of course, true shots in the dark can and will be taken. That's probably the most exciting part, and something that desperately needs to be encouraged and enabled among occupants of the teetotalling modern day pop-cultural mainstream. How about it y'all? I'll show you mine if you show me yours...
As you can see, I can hardly contain my optimism about this state of affairs, but the downside to all of this (if there is one) is that it has swiftly brought about the inevitable conclusion of an otherwise very slowly evolving process in my listening habits, and I've been left just a bit shell-shocked as a result. When I first got serious about music towards the end of high school, I also got incredibly methodical about listening, perhaps even a bit too much so. Part of that was attributable to economics: CD's cost between $5 and $15 each back then, and I was earning $7.50 an hour working just a couple shifts a week in a bagel shop. Hence, I had to get the most out of my purchases, and would seldom acquire new discs until I simply could not stand to listen to the old ones any longer. This was not, however, entirely a money issue. I also decided that it was more useful to me as a developing composer and improvisor to know a little bit of music really well rather than to simply listen superficially to as much unique work as I could get my hands on. And as all of this threatened to severely limit breadth, I seldom allowed myself to purchase more than one disc by the same artist. Put into terms I did not possess at that time, what I sought to do was to assemble collection of major works, each of which was more of less representative of its creator's overall work, and to get to know each of them inside and out.
While colleagues and teachers have gently taken me to task since on each of these counts, I wouldn't do anything differently if I had it to do over again. No amount of stylistic breadth was truly feasible in that timeframe that would have satisfied everyone around me, nor myself, but I made surprisingly good decisions for my age, as well as some curious ones the lasting impact of which I'm only now beginning to understand, but which I don't regret one bit, since if anything, they've made me more unique (and I can say with a straight face that it was on purpose). The fact that I dwelled forever on a disc before moving on to the next one sometimes made me feel uncool, since others my age began to significantly outpace me in terms of breadth, and yet the fact that I could hum my way through a dozen complete Eric Dolphy solos before I had so much as smelled the level of technical proficiency required to execute them on tuba allowed me to reach that level sooner than I would have otherwise, dare I say sooner also than many who spent more of their practice time listening to records than actually practicing.
As my collection grew and I became aware of more and more music, my listening patterns gradually started to shift. As I've written before, this is part of the reason my overall listening decreased quite markedly between about 2004 and 2007 (late in college and immediately after graduation): because there was now so much more to get to, I spent less time on everything, and because I spent less time on everything, I developed shallower relationships with that music, both emotionally and technically. I went through a withdrawal of sorts, having become addicted to the naive and single-minded excitement that accompanied my initial exposure to so many of my early purchases. This sort of intense attachment developed less and less from my newer acquisitions either because I chose them out of mere professional obligation, or because the overall thrill of listening records was lessened by the fact that it was no longer a new discovery, but rather an addiction of sorts that cost money and begot plenty of interpersonal conflict, just like real drugs do.
Long story longer, Lala has rousted me from these doldrums and thrown me headlong into shallower, "survey" listening that is intensely exciting simply because it's a new way of doing things, but also because I sense the opportunity to finally start balancing out those several years where I embraced depth over breadth. I now spend most all of my listening time on Lala investigating things I'm curious about for some reason or another, knowing from the start that I have only one chance to listen for free. Ultimately, I know from experience that without returning at some point to the kind of deeper, repeated listening that begets memorization and occasionally even obsession, my true "knowledge" of music will stagnate and my creative well will begin to run dry. However, as you could have guessed from the story I just told, there are some fairly significant holes not just in my pantheon of favorites, but indeed in my overall experience as well. Lala is giving me a chance to remedy that, a chance that I never anticipated having, or, in some ways, even wanting. However, now that something has restored the naive, child-like excitement of my earliest days of "serious" musicianship, I'm inclined to ride that wave of excitement, hopefully all the way to the kind of comprehensive bird's eye view of recorded music history that I haven't allowed myself to develop previously. That can't possibly be a bad thing.
There's a social networking component to Lala, which is equal parts annoying and seductive. You can officially "follow" other listeners Twitter-style, or just visit their home pages where their supposed listening habits are on display. Every album is categorized according to genre, and your home page generates a bar graph to represent your tendencies. The assumption that the total quantity of tracks heard from an arbitrarily assigned (and often flat out misapplied) genre equates directly to a preference for that genre is an unfortunate pop culture holdover; making the same assumption about repeated listening is a bit safer, but not safe enough. Everything on the Tzadik label is considered "Rock," including some recent Wadada Leo Smith records that belie that categorization just a bit. Meanwhile, Univers Zero is egregiously labeled "Pop," Elmo Hope "Classical," and Monk's records seem to move up the food chain from "Jazz" to "Rock" to "Pop" based on how well they've sold.
In light of all of this, and also fearing that my, ahem, purely investigative forays into much music I can't stand could possibly reflect badly on my reputation among like minded colleagues (yes, both of them), I've forgone linking my Facebook account with Lala, which is an option that would have saved me the trouble of registering with yet another site, but which ultimately was less attractive for its potential to blow my cover. Hence, in order to find out what I'm up to, you'll have to know where to look, and I'm not going to tell you, though I'll give you a hint and say that if you don't recognize both the pseudonym and the photo, then you really ought to hang out here more often. I'm disappointed to find that the listening history apparently begins to purge itself after a couple of months. That's the one feature of the home page that I found essential, not to mention intriguing from a "digital remains" standpoint; imagine 22nd century musicologists settling the issue of whether a dead composer knew this or that piece by an obscure contemporary only after convincing his widow to log them into his Lala account. Of course, in enforcement of the "One Free Listen" policy, the complete history is indeed stored somewhere, even if it's not publicly visible, and this further begs the question of why it would be too much trouble to display it on the home page.
I'm too enamored with the product as well as with my newfound freedom to attempt to circumvent the limitations on free listening by simply creating a million accounts. In fact, taking into account the multiple recordings of major classical works that are available, as well as a few jazz albums which have been reissued and repackaged over the years, there are actually plenty of opportunities to hear a piece multiple times while remaining firmly within the confines of ethical behavior (I managed to find 10 versions of Stravinsky's "Symphonies of Wind Instruments," a piece my college wind ensemble played once, but which I wasn't assigned to; I wish I had been). I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I haven't purchased anything yet, and if they go belly up before I do, I'll feel lame about it. Speaking strictly about the product, though (I know nothing of their business practices) and what it does to the landscape of online listening, it seems like just the kind of operation worth supporting, while the soundbite boutiques and aspiring mind-readers seem less and less so. If anyone I've mentioned it to in person had ever used it, I wouldn't have bothered giving it so much airtime here.
03 March 2010
Boundaries
Duke Ellington is remembered, among other things, as a composer who wrote for specific musicians and personalities rather than for some nameless abstract conception of what given instruments could or should sound like. If this is so, he must have worried more about the present than the future, since others would continue to play his music long after he and the musicians he wrote for were gone. Perhaps the advent of recording technology (which happened within his lifetime) made this approach more palatable, since the work of the specific bands he wrote for could then be documented conclusively; or perhaps it was simply his intuitive way of writing and he never gave a second thought to how he would be remembered. The least likely explanation, though, would seem to be that he wished to subvert the traditional hierarchy that existed in European music between composer and performer; that it really bothered him when the person who wrote the music got all the credit; that he set out from the beginning to mitigate the influence of the composer's ego from the music making process in a quasi-Cagean way.
I'm not an Ellington expert, nor a worshipper, nor a detractor, and have no axe to grind with his work or legacy, but because no one (and I mean no one) misses an opportunity to invoke this textbook one-liner about his compositional style, I think it's worth problematizing. To be a bit less rosy about it for just a second, one might also say that allowing your players to simply "do their thing" means not asking them to venture outside of their comfort zone. It means setting parameters that make for predicable results and minimal difficulty in achieving them, the polar opposite of a full-fledged experiment where the outcome is not known at the outset.
Musicians tend to spend the majority of their time working somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, in a space where the musical parameters are overwhelmingly familiar but not entirely so. Where we feel compelled to move away from this more common mode of working and towards either extreme (i.e. merely going entirely with what we know, or conversely, more thoroughly subjecting ourselves to the whims of chance), this is usually a consequence of externally imposed conditions, such as being hired to play a wedding ceremony, or being thrown into a jam session comprised of people you've never heard or played with. The difference between these two types of contexts is not that one is destined to succeed and the other to fail, but merely that we know what to expect from one but not the other. One offers comfort without the potential for growth; the other offers the opposite.
A blind allegiance to unfamiliar, difficult situations in the name of musical and personal growth is meaningless in absence of an eventual outlet for cashing in on that growth, the products of which are necessarily obtained by way of tasks which have become familiar through experience. Similarly, the outright absence from one's musical menu of any potential for growth in the form of unfamiliar or experimental musical contexts is a sure recipe for a hardening of the arteries. As musicians, we do our best to balance these two concerns in our work, striving to offer safe but competent musical products when that response is appropriate, as well as throwing caution to the wind when we see the potential for something new and exciting to take shape.
Knowing when to do which, though, can be tricky and contentious, and there's great danger in distilling the approach of an artist like Ellington, who had a long, eminent, and prolific career, into single-sentence pieces of advice. I doubt very much that Ellington himself would approve of the way many musicians now invoke his most famous compositional tenet merely as an excuse for not rocking the boat, for not making people uncomfortable, not forcing them to grow, not putting them in a position where they might fail; all of this in the service of some vague and ultimately overly idealistic aspiration to an all-encompassing collectivity where individual artistic voice is neutered in the name of group consensus.
Ellington indeed wrote for people rather than conceits, but the music is undeniably his. Just because voice might be a source of egotistical attachment to our own music doesn't mean it's worth subduing in polite musical company. To revert to one of my favorite metaphors for a second, I consider voice to be the essential source of biodiversity in a musical ecosystem: without a diversity of voice surrounding us, we become creatively inbred and defective. The ego is, indeed, equally destructive in the social realm of music making, but there are more attractive ways around that inconvenient fact than simply abandoning any compositional device that might harm our colleagues' buzz.
I'm not an Ellington expert, nor a worshipper, nor a detractor, and have no axe to grind with his work or legacy, but because no one (and I mean no one) misses an opportunity to invoke this textbook one-liner about his compositional style, I think it's worth problematizing. To be a bit less rosy about it for just a second, one might also say that allowing your players to simply "do their thing" means not asking them to venture outside of their comfort zone. It means setting parameters that make for predicable results and minimal difficulty in achieving them, the polar opposite of a full-fledged experiment where the outcome is not known at the outset.
Musicians tend to spend the majority of their time working somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, in a space where the musical parameters are overwhelmingly familiar but not entirely so. Where we feel compelled to move away from this more common mode of working and towards either extreme (i.e. merely going entirely with what we know, or conversely, more thoroughly subjecting ourselves to the whims of chance), this is usually a consequence of externally imposed conditions, such as being hired to play a wedding ceremony, or being thrown into a jam session comprised of people you've never heard or played with. The difference between these two types of contexts is not that one is destined to succeed and the other to fail, but merely that we know what to expect from one but not the other. One offers comfort without the potential for growth; the other offers the opposite.
A blind allegiance to unfamiliar, difficult situations in the name of musical and personal growth is meaningless in absence of an eventual outlet for cashing in on that growth, the products of which are necessarily obtained by way of tasks which have become familiar through experience. Similarly, the outright absence from one's musical menu of any potential for growth in the form of unfamiliar or experimental musical contexts is a sure recipe for a hardening of the arteries. As musicians, we do our best to balance these two concerns in our work, striving to offer safe but competent musical products when that response is appropriate, as well as throwing caution to the wind when we see the potential for something new and exciting to take shape.
Knowing when to do which, though, can be tricky and contentious, and there's great danger in distilling the approach of an artist like Ellington, who had a long, eminent, and prolific career, into single-sentence pieces of advice. I doubt very much that Ellington himself would approve of the way many musicians now invoke his most famous compositional tenet merely as an excuse for not rocking the boat, for not making people uncomfortable, not forcing them to grow, not putting them in a position where they might fail; all of this in the service of some vague and ultimately overly idealistic aspiration to an all-encompassing collectivity where individual artistic voice is neutered in the name of group consensus.
Ellington indeed wrote for people rather than conceits, but the music is undeniably his. Just because voice might be a source of egotistical attachment to our own music doesn't mean it's worth subduing in polite musical company. To revert to one of my favorite metaphors for a second, I consider voice to be the essential source of biodiversity in a musical ecosystem: without a diversity of voice surrounding us, we become creatively inbred and defective. The ego is, indeed, equally destructive in the social realm of music making, but there are more attractive ways around that inconvenient fact than simply abandoning any compositional device that might harm our colleagues' buzz.
18 January 2010
A Nickel For Your Thoughts
Whenever I return to the Complete Plugged Nickel recordings of Miles Davis' 1960s quintet, I find myself compelled to share something I've realized or thought of. Tonight, it relates to the questions of structural listening and audience outreach, which have become a recurring theme on this blog lately.
As a group which had the uncanny ability to essentially improvise form, this great quintet provides a unique case study in structural listening. Most highly trained professionals would be hard-pressed to follow every last structural twist and turn the first time they heard many of these cuts, and some would be lucky to catch even a few. These are performances which, to some extent or another, level the playing field between trained and untrained ears. Hence, given their exalted place in the pantheon, it is reasonable to assume that a large part of their attractiveness lies elsewhere, namely in what might be called "surface" elements. Because the music is successful on the moment-to-moment level, one need not be able to follow the form in order to reap great pleasure from the experience.
Music that is not successful on the surface is not successful period, and one cannot make an end run around this fact merely by substituting "understanding" for "enjoying." Modern music cannot simply be explained away by positing that it must appeal to something other than the senses, for in the realm of music, that is a contradiction in terms. Technical proficiency is meaningless in absence of emotional resonance, nor does one equate to the other (just ask any musician who's held a "day job" simply to get by). This is why outreach can profitably deal in exposure but not in persuasion, and why its potential impact is neither infinite nor scalable.
Given that this issue has become so badly distorted largely due to a preponderance of pop culture colloquialisms in our contemporary musical dialogue, it's fitting that I might resort to one myself in order to illustrate my point, and that would be the idea of the "mind-blowing" listening experience. No other phrase could so capably encapsulate the value of listening without understanding! Yet there's an all-too-convenient double standard available to anyone who can't be bothered to explain themselves in anything but the vaguest of terms: when the music is good, it's "mind-blowing," when it's bad, it's "incomprehensible." If failing to understand can be either good or bad depending on the circumstances, something is mighty fishy here. There's obviously more to it than that, more than a pre-concert lecture or interactive workshop can account for.
As I've said here before, structural listening is a crap shoot in my case. It just as often detracts from the experience as enhances it. There is much music which has grown on me over time, and this has surely been attributable to structural listening in many cases, but in the case of the Plugged Nickel, I find the opposite to be true. Many of the cuts are most fascinating to me when heard on the moment-to-moment, surface level, and become, understandably, a bit harrowing once I start to mentally outline the form of the performance and compare it to the original form of the tune. This is not to say that the surface becomes less appealing, only that I am quite literally distracted from this attractive surface by my now firmly entrenched performer instincts to "hold the form" at all times. It serves as a perfect example of why I'm apprehensive about audience outreach activities aimed at simulating technical proficiency in novice listeners: technical proficiency has ruined more music for me than it has revealed, and I can't see the value of perpetrating that crime on anyone else.
As a group which had the uncanny ability to essentially improvise form, this great quintet provides a unique case study in structural listening. Most highly trained professionals would be hard-pressed to follow every last structural twist and turn the first time they heard many of these cuts, and some would be lucky to catch even a few. These are performances which, to some extent or another, level the playing field between trained and untrained ears. Hence, given their exalted place in the pantheon, it is reasonable to assume that a large part of their attractiveness lies elsewhere, namely in what might be called "surface" elements. Because the music is successful on the moment-to-moment level, one need not be able to follow the form in order to reap great pleasure from the experience.
Music that is not successful on the surface is not successful period, and one cannot make an end run around this fact merely by substituting "understanding" for "enjoying." Modern music cannot simply be explained away by positing that it must appeal to something other than the senses, for in the realm of music, that is a contradiction in terms. Technical proficiency is meaningless in absence of emotional resonance, nor does one equate to the other (just ask any musician who's held a "day job" simply to get by). This is why outreach can profitably deal in exposure but not in persuasion, and why its potential impact is neither infinite nor scalable.
Given that this issue has become so badly distorted largely due to a preponderance of pop culture colloquialisms in our contemporary musical dialogue, it's fitting that I might resort to one myself in order to illustrate my point, and that would be the idea of the "mind-blowing" listening experience. No other phrase could so capably encapsulate the value of listening without understanding! Yet there's an all-too-convenient double standard available to anyone who can't be bothered to explain themselves in anything but the vaguest of terms: when the music is good, it's "mind-blowing," when it's bad, it's "incomprehensible." If failing to understand can be either good or bad depending on the circumstances, something is mighty fishy here. There's obviously more to it than that, more than a pre-concert lecture or interactive workshop can account for.
As I've said here before, structural listening is a crap shoot in my case. It just as often detracts from the experience as enhances it. There is much music which has grown on me over time, and this has surely been attributable to structural listening in many cases, but in the case of the Plugged Nickel, I find the opposite to be true. Many of the cuts are most fascinating to me when heard on the moment-to-moment, surface level, and become, understandably, a bit harrowing once I start to mentally outline the form of the performance and compare it to the original form of the tune. This is not to say that the surface becomes less appealing, only that I am quite literally distracted from this attractive surface by my now firmly entrenched performer instincts to "hold the form" at all times. It serves as a perfect example of why I'm apprehensive about audience outreach activities aimed at simulating technical proficiency in novice listeners: technical proficiency has ruined more music for me than it has revealed, and I can't see the value of perpetrating that crime on anyone else.
12 January 2010
Equipment Odyssey
It seems like about once a year, I receive an e-mail from another tuba player wondering which instrument, mouthpiece, etc. I use, as well as my reasons for doing so. Rather than reinventing the wheel in a fresh series of e-mails every time I get these questions, as I've been doing, I'm going to attempt to answer them definitively in this space ahead of time so that I can simply refer future inquiries here. Obviously, that's somewhat impossible to do for all time, since I reserve the right to change my mind and/or my horn at any point. I'll try to remember to post any future updates at the end of the thread.
As the first order of business, I'll simply list my equipment, since that's the info most people are after. If for some reason you're interested in reading further about how I arrived at this point and how it has served me, I'm also including an exhaustive "FAQ" section that goes beyond the "what" to the "why" and "how." If you're a non-tubist who reads this blog more for the musico-philosophical ramblings, consider yourself warned: I speak fluent gearhead, even though it's not my native tongue. My feelings won't be hurt in the least if you decide to sit this one out and wait for the next post on the nature of perception or some other abstract shit. It won't be long, I promise.
Without further ado...
My Current Set-Up
tuba: Meinl-Weston 2141 E-flat Tuba
purchased: new, in August, 2006 from Woodwind and Brasswind
bore: .748 (.768 5th valve) valves: 4 pistons (non-compensating), 5th rotor
mouthpieces: Melton 18 (the one that came with the horn) and Kelly 18 (two spares...I'm forgetful, and so I hide mouthpieces like Easter eggs; good thing these actually kind of look like Easter eggs)
mute: Humes and Berg Stonelined Symphonic (purchased long before the horn, but works ok with it)
oil: Hetman Piston Lubricant #2
transport: Altieri custom gig bag (top loading)
FAQ
•Why do you play an E-flat tuba?
The short answer is that once I decided to choose a horn based on what I needed to use it for rather than what key it's in, I was left with only a few choices, and most of them were E-flats. In the months and years leading up to the purchase of my current instrument, I was guided by 3 primary concerns, discussed below:
(1) finding a medium-sized instrument (non-tuba players are surely having a laugh at that statement, but keep in mind I'm talking relatively here) that could serve as my only tuba (i.e. as opposed to playing 2 or 3 tubas of varying sizes and keys, which most professionals of various stripes currently do).
Tuba players will debate endlessly whether being a one-horn player is a good idea, even for those of us that perform almost exclusively with small groups. There are many reasons I decided to go this route. First and foremost, I have one sound concept, not two, and frankly, I got sick of trying to make my big horn and my small horn sound the same. That's not the point of having two horns anyway. Secondly, my decision not to pursue an orchestral career obviated the need to own a very large instrument capable of anchoring a very large ensemble, and along with it, the need to also own a very small instrument capable of doing what the very large one couldn't (namely, everything else). Finally, I'm not ashamed to admit that the convenience factor was indeed a consideration (and I'm not just talking about logistical convenience, but also the musical and technical convenience of investing 100% of one's practice time in a single horn).
As an ignorant college freshman who had just received my first tuba as an exceedingly generous high school graduation present from my family, finding out that owning two horns was de rigeur in my chosen field was a shock I wasn't prepared for. It seemed patently absurd on economic and logistical grounds alone, but also on musical ones, as I didn't know enough to think that I couldn't play anything and everything on the very large BB-flat tuba I had just acquired. Through a combination of knowledge gathering, general mellowing out, and many many fruitless practice sessions trying to scream out bebop solos on a big rotary valve horn, I now have a greater understanding of and respect for the reasons why a player would see fit to own two tubas. I have to admit, though, that the initial shock of that absurdity still hasn't worn off, mostly because the two-horn paradigm is so narrowly focused on the professional orchestral world. Once I got outside of that particular box, I couldn't think of a good reason to play two horns. I still can't.
If it sounds like I'm overreaching here, it's because I really like my horn and can't believe how well suited it is to damn near everything. I even got to play it in the back of a medium-sized orchestra once and got nothing but positive feedback. I also used it successfully on a major orchestra sub list audition which consisted mostly of big-horn rep. Yes, overall convenience was always in the back of my mind, but I do truly feel that I've found my voice on this horn, and I wouldn't play it were that not the case (more about that below).
(2) The best compromise in playability throughout all registers, including the extremes.
This is partly a function of #1, but not exclusively. I've played plenty of BBb and CC tubas that can't hold a candle to the low register on my horn. The greatest compromise with this horn is the high range, which I find to be somewhat stiff and lacking in response in comparison to some of the higher end F tubas that I've tried. I chose it anyway because high playing is my strength; I need more help on the low end, and this horn gives me exactly that.
Perhaps choosing a horn that compensates for your weaknesses over one that enhances your strengths isn't exactly doing things by the book; if you think about it, the latter is necessarily a two-horn paradigm and the former a one-horn paradigm. In any case, I'd say that owning a different horn for each one of your weaknesses most definitely is a cop out. At the earlier stages of development, it's also a good way to stunt one's musical growth. Conversely, I have no more excuses for not being able to play low, and no choice as to which horn is going to get me there. That has made it easier to focus and get things done. Meanwhile, the high range has solidified nicely now that I've spent some quality time with the instrument, and I now feel great about the 4 octaves from the lowest BBb on the piano on up, all inclusive chromatically. I can't say that about any of the other horns I've owned.
(3) My sound concept, which is irrevocably influenced by the older, American-made BBb tubas I grew up playing and hearing.
The Meinl-Weston E-flat isn't exactly a sonic clone of these horns, but it's at least a kindred spirit, capable of a clear, round tone, especially down low (and even with many or all of the valves down, which in my experience is exceptional for a tuba in any key). The character in the middle and upper range is more directly akin to what comes out of a big BBb in the same range, only it's many times easier to play up there on a smaller horn. The intonation is also above average, if a little quirky in a few peculiar places.
After one of my very first performances with this horn, my mother, who had become rather fond of the sound of the Yamaha 621 F tuba I had played previously, remarked that whereas before my sound had something dynamic, it now just sounded like a regular old tuba. One is always wary of disappointing one's parents, but in a strange way, I knew from this comment that I had chosen the right horn. The Yamaha certainly has something all its own, something dynamic and unattainable on any other tuba, but this certain something is inescapable on that horn, permeating every note one plays on it. As the cliche goes (it's a cliche in the tuba world, at least), on the Yamaha I sounded like I was playing a Yamaha, whereas on the Meinl-Weston I sound like myself. All horns put you in a box to some extent; that's another reason people often play more than one. My problem is that I never really wanted or needed two distinct sound concepts, but rather one horn with a more generic tuba sound which can then be subtly altered in many different ways. And now, that's what I've got.
My mother's comment also came after I had only been playing the horn for a matter of months; with time, I feel I've increasingly made it my own, though that process still ongoing. The most important thing, though, is that its happening at all, that the horn I'm playing is flexible enough to allow my sound to evolve into something personal rather than just my version of the Yamaha sound or the Meinl-Weston sound.
One of the things I do miss about the Yamaha is that it records well. By this, I mean that the sound right off the bell in a dead room, while far from ideal, is something that someone might actually want to listen to. I can't say the same for the Meinl-Weston; it needs a lot of help in such situations. However, get it into a medium-sized concert or recital hall and it absolutely sings. It's frustrating that in my line of work (i.e. playing mostly in less-than-ideal acoustical spaces, like bars and galleries), this defect is often readily apparent. Even so, I'm not willing to sacrifice everything else this horn allows me to do simply for that reason.
•Are you saying everyone should play E-flat?
Of course not. That's silly. Everyone should play the horn (or horns) that suit their needs and their concept. Having said that, I think it's undeniable that many American tuba players view the E-flat tuba as something of a novelty, and that they'd be wise to reconsider. There are many reasons this view persists; the dogmatism of many big-name orchestral tuba players and teachers towards playing CC and F tubas exclusively is a big one; then there's the simple fact that the key of Eb is the furthest from the key of C of any of the keys tubas are made in; finally, there's the dominance of the two-horn paradigm, which dictates that the two instruments be sufficiently different enough from each other to justify using both of them (the horn that I play is bigger than many doublers' "small" horns, although there are a few players who use it as such; there are of course, smaller E-flats available which fill the "small" horn role more capably).
One thing we don't lack are visible examples of successful E-flat tubists: Øystein Baadsvik, Patrick Sheridan, and Marty Erickson all come to mind. But these players are not primarily known as orchestral players, nor even necessarily just as "straight classical" players; to some extent, they all do a variety of other things that most tubists (sadly) don't or can't do. I think that partially explains their choice of instrument, though you'd have to ask them to be sure, but even if this is the case, if it is to have an influence on future generations of tuba players, it will likely have to be an indirect one. That's because neither the institutions of higher learning where "serious" music hides out nor the students who show up at their doors each fall seem to give a rodent's behind about anything but orchestral excerpts drawn from what is now not only a very narrow cross section of all extant music, but in fact a pretty darn narrow cross section of Western Music specifically as well. One day, university music schools in this country will cease to emphasize disproportionately over all other styles and forms of Western musical performance this single facet of its staggeringly diverse history. Until then, though, you're not likely to see too many students coming out of college playing one horn, and especially not playing Eb as their one horn, not if they want to graduate at least.
•Was it hard learning E-flat fingerings? What about jazz and improvising?
Tubas are made in 4 keys, and I had played all the others regularly at some point before I purchased my E-flat (my experience on CC was limited to high school band, but it still comes back to me on the rare occasion that I pick one up). After switching from euphonium to tuba in 9th grade, I played primarily BBb tuba all the way through my 4th year of college, picking up F tuba along the way in my 2nd year. It was like pulling teeth. Even when I sold the BBb after college and spent a year freelancing with the F tuba as the only horn I owned, my sight-reading never approached the level it had been at with the BBb. Improvising was also extremely difficult at first, but working through that process is unquestionably the most beneficial thing I've ever done for my jazz playing. It reduces everything a developing improvisor is wrestling with to its essence and attaches it to you like a ball and chain until you overcome it. After merely dabbling with it for the first couple of years I owned the F, I finally took the plunge my senior year and never looked back. Suddenly, keys mattered less than they ever did, and I was thinking about what I was doing in a way that I hadn't before.
Having been through the process once before definitely played a part in easing the transition from F to E-flat. However, I think that the more important difference was that I went cold turkey. I played my first public jazz gig on E-flat after only having owned it for a couple of weeks. That would have been impossible 5 years earlier when I first picked up my F, but then again, besides the fact that I was older and more experienced, it bears mentioning that when I bought the F, I continued to play BBb at least 70% of the time for a couple of years, and didn't play the F with a school ensemble until I'd had it for almost a year and a half. Conversely, when I bought my E-flat, I put the F in its case and didn't take it out for quite a long time. I relearned all the music for all the bands I was playing in, and started running Real Book tunes in all transpositions in whatever time was left over. I didn't miss a beat because I didn't have a choice. I was in the earliest stages of a freelance career and was earning quite meager living, but people were paying me nonetheless, even if it wasn't a lot, and so it had to be good right off the bat.
The issue of "fingerings" is a silly one in my mind. Some younger tuba players are envious of instruments where the music itself is transposed to make the fingerings the same for every instrument in the family; they may not realize that any saxophone or trumpet player worth their salt can read in at least a couple of different transpositions, including concert pitch. Similarly, other instrumentalists are often confused when I tell them I'm not transposing my part when I read it, as are some composers when I tell them I play an E-flat tuba but prefer a part in concert pitch. Frankly, the tuba family functions the way that most sensible people nowadays can only wish that saxophones and trumpets did, namely, that music is always written in concert pitch, regardless of which key the instrument playing it is pitched in. There's a tradition of writing transposed tuba parts in British-style brass bands, but internationally, that seems to be an anomaly (I'm thankful that I took a detour through the trumpet section as a middle schooler, since the ability to read Bb treble clef became indispensable later on; and of course, Eb treble clef and bass clef look almost the same, so nowadays, that takes care of itself).
My long winded point? Get the horn that plays with the sound, pitch, and response that you want. Then learn to deal with the key. In that order. Period.
•Why do you play pistons instead of rotors?
I'm not much of a scholar on this topic, but it's worth mentioning anyway. I had tuba teachers along the way who advocated strongly for both, and usually just as strongly against the other. To state the obvious, the first horn I played (a euphonium) was a piston horn. Though I cut my teeth on a rotary horn in college, in the end, I never really felt at home that way. When I went looking for a horn to take to college, I realized that if I was to be stubborn about (1) playing BBb, and (2) having 5 valves, I had very few choices...as in, like, 2 choices: a Miraphone 186, which is what I ended up with, and a VMI, the model number of which escapes me (unfortunately, the Miraphone 1291 did not yet exist in the year 2000).
I loved the 186, which just so happened to have rotors, and so I decided to put up with them. It wasn't something that ever particularly bothered me, and frankly, it even took a while to warm up to pistons once I added a piston F to my stable. Nonetheless, fast forward to 2009 and I can't imagine ever playing a rotary horn again. For one thing, rotors will work flawlessly for months or even years with little or no maintenance, but if something does go wrong, it's an instant crisis. Pistons, on the other hand, seem to present a different piddily annoyance each and every day, but these seldom coalesce into a repair emergency.
If you're wondering why I haven't mentioned jazz playing yet, you're onto something. Again, I came of age playing bebop on that Miraphone, and that training has served me extremely well ever since. However, pistons just feel better when it comes to bebop playing. I can't get any more specific than that, other than to point to one minor quibble with rotors, which is that half-valving is incredibly difficult to control. I'm not absolutely certain as I've never taken a rotary horn apart, but I suspect that the problem lies in the surface area in between the two holes in the valve (i.e. the hole that merely passes the air on to the next tube and the hole that diverts the air into that valve's slide, changing the pitch). With pistons, there's quite a bit of play there, sometimes enough to block the air column almost completely. With rotors, though, there's just barely enough to maybe get lucky if you put the valve in just the right position. If you don't (likely) you don't get the desired effect.
That's the only concrete reason I can think of to play pistons over rotors. I'll let others compare physics equations if they want, but for me, it comes down to a combination of this small practical matter with a broader conceptual intuition that is completely subjective.
As the first order of business, I'll simply list my equipment, since that's the info most people are after. If for some reason you're interested in reading further about how I arrived at this point and how it has served me, I'm also including an exhaustive "FAQ" section that goes beyond the "what" to the "why" and "how." If you're a non-tubist who reads this blog more for the musico-philosophical ramblings, consider yourself warned: I speak fluent gearhead, even though it's not my native tongue. My feelings won't be hurt in the least if you decide to sit this one out and wait for the next post on the nature of perception or some other abstract shit. It won't be long, I promise.
Without further ado...
My Current Set-Up
tuba: Meinl-Weston 2141 E-flat Tuba
purchased: new, in August, 2006 from Woodwind and Brasswind
bore: .748 (.768 5th valve) valves: 4 pistons (non-compensating), 5th rotor
mouthpieces: Melton 18 (the one that came with the horn) and Kelly 18 (two spares...I'm forgetful, and so I hide mouthpieces like Easter eggs; good thing these actually kind of look like Easter eggs)
mute: Humes and Berg Stonelined Symphonic (purchased long before the horn, but works ok with it)
oil: Hetman Piston Lubricant #2
transport: Altieri custom gig bag (top loading)
FAQ
•Why do you play an E-flat tuba?
The short answer is that once I decided to choose a horn based on what I needed to use it for rather than what key it's in, I was left with only a few choices, and most of them were E-flats. In the months and years leading up to the purchase of my current instrument, I was guided by 3 primary concerns, discussed below:
(1) finding a medium-sized instrument (non-tuba players are surely having a laugh at that statement, but keep in mind I'm talking relatively here) that could serve as my only tuba (i.e. as opposed to playing 2 or 3 tubas of varying sizes and keys, which most professionals of various stripes currently do).
Tuba players will debate endlessly whether being a one-horn player is a good idea, even for those of us that perform almost exclusively with small groups. There are many reasons I decided to go this route. First and foremost, I have one sound concept, not two, and frankly, I got sick of trying to make my big horn and my small horn sound the same. That's not the point of having two horns anyway. Secondly, my decision not to pursue an orchestral career obviated the need to own a very large instrument capable of anchoring a very large ensemble, and along with it, the need to also own a very small instrument capable of doing what the very large one couldn't (namely, everything else). Finally, I'm not ashamed to admit that the convenience factor was indeed a consideration (and I'm not just talking about logistical convenience, but also the musical and technical convenience of investing 100% of one's practice time in a single horn).
As an ignorant college freshman who had just received my first tuba as an exceedingly generous high school graduation present from my family, finding out that owning two horns was de rigeur in my chosen field was a shock I wasn't prepared for. It seemed patently absurd on economic and logistical grounds alone, but also on musical ones, as I didn't know enough to think that I couldn't play anything and everything on the very large BB-flat tuba I had just acquired. Through a combination of knowledge gathering, general mellowing out, and many many fruitless practice sessions trying to scream out bebop solos on a big rotary valve horn, I now have a greater understanding of and respect for the reasons why a player would see fit to own two tubas. I have to admit, though, that the initial shock of that absurdity still hasn't worn off, mostly because the two-horn paradigm is so narrowly focused on the professional orchestral world. Once I got outside of that particular box, I couldn't think of a good reason to play two horns. I still can't.
If it sounds like I'm overreaching here, it's because I really like my horn and can't believe how well suited it is to damn near everything. I even got to play it in the back of a medium-sized orchestra once and got nothing but positive feedback. I also used it successfully on a major orchestra sub list audition which consisted mostly of big-horn rep. Yes, overall convenience was always in the back of my mind, but I do truly feel that I've found my voice on this horn, and I wouldn't play it were that not the case (more about that below).
(2) The best compromise in playability throughout all registers, including the extremes.
This is partly a function of #1, but not exclusively. I've played plenty of BBb and CC tubas that can't hold a candle to the low register on my horn. The greatest compromise with this horn is the high range, which I find to be somewhat stiff and lacking in response in comparison to some of the higher end F tubas that I've tried. I chose it anyway because high playing is my strength; I need more help on the low end, and this horn gives me exactly that.
Perhaps choosing a horn that compensates for your weaknesses over one that enhances your strengths isn't exactly doing things by the book; if you think about it, the latter is necessarily a two-horn paradigm and the former a one-horn paradigm. In any case, I'd say that owning a different horn for each one of your weaknesses most definitely is a cop out. At the earlier stages of development, it's also a good way to stunt one's musical growth. Conversely, I have no more excuses for not being able to play low, and no choice as to which horn is going to get me there. That has made it easier to focus and get things done. Meanwhile, the high range has solidified nicely now that I've spent some quality time with the instrument, and I now feel great about the 4 octaves from the lowest BBb on the piano on up, all inclusive chromatically. I can't say that about any of the other horns I've owned.
(3) My sound concept, which is irrevocably influenced by the older, American-made BBb tubas I grew up playing and hearing.
The Meinl-Weston E-flat isn't exactly a sonic clone of these horns, but it's at least a kindred spirit, capable of a clear, round tone, especially down low (and even with many or all of the valves down, which in my experience is exceptional for a tuba in any key). The character in the middle and upper range is more directly akin to what comes out of a big BBb in the same range, only it's many times easier to play up there on a smaller horn. The intonation is also above average, if a little quirky in a few peculiar places.
After one of my very first performances with this horn, my mother, who had become rather fond of the sound of the Yamaha 621 F tuba I had played previously, remarked that whereas before my sound had something dynamic, it now just sounded like a regular old tuba. One is always wary of disappointing one's parents, but in a strange way, I knew from this comment that I had chosen the right horn. The Yamaha certainly has something all its own, something dynamic and unattainable on any other tuba, but this certain something is inescapable on that horn, permeating every note one plays on it. As the cliche goes (it's a cliche in the tuba world, at least), on the Yamaha I sounded like I was playing a Yamaha, whereas on the Meinl-Weston I sound like myself. All horns put you in a box to some extent; that's another reason people often play more than one. My problem is that I never really wanted or needed two distinct sound concepts, but rather one horn with a more generic tuba sound which can then be subtly altered in many different ways. And now, that's what I've got.
My mother's comment also came after I had only been playing the horn for a matter of months; with time, I feel I've increasingly made it my own, though that process still ongoing. The most important thing, though, is that its happening at all, that the horn I'm playing is flexible enough to allow my sound to evolve into something personal rather than just my version of the Yamaha sound or the Meinl-Weston sound.
One of the things I do miss about the Yamaha is that it records well. By this, I mean that the sound right off the bell in a dead room, while far from ideal, is something that someone might actually want to listen to. I can't say the same for the Meinl-Weston; it needs a lot of help in such situations. However, get it into a medium-sized concert or recital hall and it absolutely sings. It's frustrating that in my line of work (i.e. playing mostly in less-than-ideal acoustical spaces, like bars and galleries), this defect is often readily apparent. Even so, I'm not willing to sacrifice everything else this horn allows me to do simply for that reason.
•Are you saying everyone should play E-flat?
Of course not. That's silly. Everyone should play the horn (or horns) that suit their needs and their concept. Having said that, I think it's undeniable that many American tuba players view the E-flat tuba as something of a novelty, and that they'd be wise to reconsider. There are many reasons this view persists; the dogmatism of many big-name orchestral tuba players and teachers towards playing CC and F tubas exclusively is a big one; then there's the simple fact that the key of Eb is the furthest from the key of C of any of the keys tubas are made in; finally, there's the dominance of the two-horn paradigm, which dictates that the two instruments be sufficiently different enough from each other to justify using both of them (the horn that I play is bigger than many doublers' "small" horns, although there are a few players who use it as such; there are of course, smaller E-flats available which fill the "small" horn role more capably).
One thing we don't lack are visible examples of successful E-flat tubists: Øystein Baadsvik, Patrick Sheridan, and Marty Erickson all come to mind. But these players are not primarily known as orchestral players, nor even necessarily just as "straight classical" players; to some extent, they all do a variety of other things that most tubists (sadly) don't or can't do. I think that partially explains their choice of instrument, though you'd have to ask them to be sure, but even if this is the case, if it is to have an influence on future generations of tuba players, it will likely have to be an indirect one. That's because neither the institutions of higher learning where "serious" music hides out nor the students who show up at their doors each fall seem to give a rodent's behind about anything but orchestral excerpts drawn from what is now not only a very narrow cross section of all extant music, but in fact a pretty darn narrow cross section of Western Music specifically as well. One day, university music schools in this country will cease to emphasize disproportionately over all other styles and forms of Western musical performance this single facet of its staggeringly diverse history. Until then, though, you're not likely to see too many students coming out of college playing one horn, and especially not playing Eb as their one horn, not if they want to graduate at least.
•Was it hard learning E-flat fingerings? What about jazz and improvising?
Tubas are made in 4 keys, and I had played all the others regularly at some point before I purchased my E-flat (my experience on CC was limited to high school band, but it still comes back to me on the rare occasion that I pick one up). After switching from euphonium to tuba in 9th grade, I played primarily BBb tuba all the way through my 4th year of college, picking up F tuba along the way in my 2nd year. It was like pulling teeth. Even when I sold the BBb after college and spent a year freelancing with the F tuba as the only horn I owned, my sight-reading never approached the level it had been at with the BBb. Improvising was also extremely difficult at first, but working through that process is unquestionably the most beneficial thing I've ever done for my jazz playing. It reduces everything a developing improvisor is wrestling with to its essence and attaches it to you like a ball and chain until you overcome it. After merely dabbling with it for the first couple of years I owned the F, I finally took the plunge my senior year and never looked back. Suddenly, keys mattered less than they ever did, and I was thinking about what I was doing in a way that I hadn't before.
Having been through the process once before definitely played a part in easing the transition from F to E-flat. However, I think that the more important difference was that I went cold turkey. I played my first public jazz gig on E-flat after only having owned it for a couple of weeks. That would have been impossible 5 years earlier when I first picked up my F, but then again, besides the fact that I was older and more experienced, it bears mentioning that when I bought the F, I continued to play BBb at least 70% of the time for a couple of years, and didn't play the F with a school ensemble until I'd had it for almost a year and a half. Conversely, when I bought my E-flat, I put the F in its case and didn't take it out for quite a long time. I relearned all the music for all the bands I was playing in, and started running Real Book tunes in all transpositions in whatever time was left over. I didn't miss a beat because I didn't have a choice. I was in the earliest stages of a freelance career and was earning quite meager living, but people were paying me nonetheless, even if it wasn't a lot, and so it had to be good right off the bat.
The issue of "fingerings" is a silly one in my mind. Some younger tuba players are envious of instruments where the music itself is transposed to make the fingerings the same for every instrument in the family; they may not realize that any saxophone or trumpet player worth their salt can read in at least a couple of different transpositions, including concert pitch. Similarly, other instrumentalists are often confused when I tell them I'm not transposing my part when I read it, as are some composers when I tell them I play an E-flat tuba but prefer a part in concert pitch. Frankly, the tuba family functions the way that most sensible people nowadays can only wish that saxophones and trumpets did, namely, that music is always written in concert pitch, regardless of which key the instrument playing it is pitched in. There's a tradition of writing transposed tuba parts in British-style brass bands, but internationally, that seems to be an anomaly (I'm thankful that I took a detour through the trumpet section as a middle schooler, since the ability to read Bb treble clef became indispensable later on; and of course, Eb treble clef and bass clef look almost the same, so nowadays, that takes care of itself).
My long winded point? Get the horn that plays with the sound, pitch, and response that you want. Then learn to deal with the key. In that order. Period.
•Why do you play pistons instead of rotors?
I'm not much of a scholar on this topic, but it's worth mentioning anyway. I had tuba teachers along the way who advocated strongly for both, and usually just as strongly against the other. To state the obvious, the first horn I played (a euphonium) was a piston horn. Though I cut my teeth on a rotary horn in college, in the end, I never really felt at home that way. When I went looking for a horn to take to college, I realized that if I was to be stubborn about (1) playing BBb, and (2) having 5 valves, I had very few choices...as in, like, 2 choices: a Miraphone 186, which is what I ended up with, and a VMI, the model number of which escapes me (unfortunately, the Miraphone 1291 did not yet exist in the year 2000).
I loved the 186, which just so happened to have rotors, and so I decided to put up with them. It wasn't something that ever particularly bothered me, and frankly, it even took a while to warm up to pistons once I added a piston F to my stable. Nonetheless, fast forward to 2009 and I can't imagine ever playing a rotary horn again. For one thing, rotors will work flawlessly for months or even years with little or no maintenance, but if something does go wrong, it's an instant crisis. Pistons, on the other hand, seem to present a different piddily annoyance each and every day, but these seldom coalesce into a repair emergency.
If you're wondering why I haven't mentioned jazz playing yet, you're onto something. Again, I came of age playing bebop on that Miraphone, and that training has served me extremely well ever since. However, pistons just feel better when it comes to bebop playing. I can't get any more specific than that, other than to point to one minor quibble with rotors, which is that half-valving is incredibly difficult to control. I'm not absolutely certain as I've never taken a rotary horn apart, but I suspect that the problem lies in the surface area in between the two holes in the valve (i.e. the hole that merely passes the air on to the next tube and the hole that diverts the air into that valve's slide, changing the pitch). With pistons, there's quite a bit of play there, sometimes enough to block the air column almost completely. With rotors, though, there's just barely enough to maybe get lucky if you put the valve in just the right position. If you don't (likely) you don't get the desired effect.
That's the only concrete reason I can think of to play pistons over rotors. I'll let others compare physics equations if they want, but for me, it comes down to a combination of this small practical matter with a broader conceptual intuition that is completely subjective.
10 January 2010
Church of the Exasperated Semitone
Returning again to the theme of musical training changing modes of perception, it occurred to me tonight* that there's a logical and straightforward explanation for why someone with an interest in bebop and post-bop jazz (music which is very much "tonal" music in the broad, lower-case "t" sense of that word) may also be drawn to atonal classical music, or at the very least, a way to draw a connection between the two styles that is simplistic yet still very much relevant. In some corners even today, of course, bebop might as well be atonal, and no one who lives there would bat an eye at such concurrent interests, but we haven't the time to waste with the "3 Chords and a Mule" crowd, so let's assume that we're speaking to those with a bit greater breadth of experience and maybe even just enough musico-technical knowledge to understand in the broadest possible terms the difference between Benny Carter and Elliott Carter.
The central harmonic innovation of early bebop was the extension of triads to include sevenths, ninths, elevenths and thirteenths. The seventh in particular gained a tremendous amount of importance, becoming equally important to the third in every way, a point underscored by the advent of the "shell" voicing (usually attributed to Bud Powell, though I'm sure as with any such attribution, it leaves out many who contributed in some small way). Even something as simple and seemingly incongruous with extended tertiary harmony as the two note root-major seventh voicing found a home as part and parcel of Monk's sound, and has in this respect, if no other, become de rigeur for modern jazz players on all instruments.
You can see where I'm going with this. In atonal classical music, the interval of a major seventh (or more properly in this context, the interval of 11 semitones) is a close relative both of the semitone (1) and of the minor ninth (13). The interval C-Db, for example, could refer to an ascending 1, an ascending 13, or a descending 11. In each case, we start on C and end on Db, just not the same C or the same Db. Dodecaphonic composers use this ambiguity to create variation within unity (don't kill me for saying that as if I believe it, I'm just trying to contextualize things). And of course, Schoenberg famously coined the phrase "emancipation of the dissonance" to refer to the fact that in "pan-tonal" music, as he preferred to call it, the traditional hierarchy of consonance and dissonance (still imposed by brute force in university music theory courses to this day in spite of his best efforts) ceased to apply. So again, we have a situation where the interval of a major seventh, the kissin' cousin of the dissonance par excellence, the semitone, has been accorded full musical citizenship and allowed the opportunity to become absolutely central to the sound of an entire musical idiom.
I use the word "opportunity" to imply that this did not happen concurrently in two historically significant musico-stylistic movements on different continents as a matter of mere dumb luck or coincidence. Is it possible that the major seventh is more inherently a consonance than than a dissonance, or at the very least, that its ghettoization in the latter realm was more justifiable on mathematical grounds than on perceptual ones? It would be foolish to make such pronouncements for all time, yet from where I sit with my peculiar set of experiences and historical vantage point, this certainly is a compelling hypothesis. What's for certain is that I have not seen the last of detractors of both idioms blaming an attraction to one on the other. They have my ilk all wrong, though: at least in my case, my interest in these two bodies of music developed concurrently, just like the bodies themselves did in the first half of the 20th century. Neither was a gateway drug to the other so much as each spoke to something that was simply "in the air" for me as a young adult, much as their concurrent development could be said to embody something that was "in the air" at that time.
The idea persists that a mere tolerance of, let alone an attraction to, music where unpartitioned major sevenths run rampant represents a pathology, a bad habit, an intellectual pose, and so on. When will it stop?
*A couple of glasses of wine and an audition of Lutoslawski's "Concerto for Orchestra" tend to make things occur to me rather rapidly.
The central harmonic innovation of early bebop was the extension of triads to include sevenths, ninths, elevenths and thirteenths. The seventh in particular gained a tremendous amount of importance, becoming equally important to the third in every way, a point underscored by the advent of the "shell" voicing (usually attributed to Bud Powell, though I'm sure as with any such attribution, it leaves out many who contributed in some small way). Even something as simple and seemingly incongruous with extended tertiary harmony as the two note root-major seventh voicing found a home as part and parcel of Monk's sound, and has in this respect, if no other, become de rigeur for modern jazz players on all instruments.
You can see where I'm going with this. In atonal classical music, the interval of a major seventh (or more properly in this context, the interval of 11 semitones) is a close relative both of the semitone (1) and of the minor ninth (13). The interval C-Db, for example, could refer to an ascending 1, an ascending 13, or a descending 11. In each case, we start on C and end on Db, just not the same C or the same Db. Dodecaphonic composers use this ambiguity to create variation within unity (don't kill me for saying that as if I believe it, I'm just trying to contextualize things). And of course, Schoenberg famously coined the phrase "emancipation of the dissonance" to refer to the fact that in "pan-tonal" music, as he preferred to call it, the traditional hierarchy of consonance and dissonance (still imposed by brute force in university music theory courses to this day in spite of his best efforts) ceased to apply. So again, we have a situation where the interval of a major seventh, the kissin' cousin of the dissonance par excellence, the semitone, has been accorded full musical citizenship and allowed the opportunity to become absolutely central to the sound of an entire musical idiom.
I use the word "opportunity" to imply that this did not happen concurrently in two historically significant musico-stylistic movements on different continents as a matter of mere dumb luck or coincidence. Is it possible that the major seventh is more inherently a consonance than than a dissonance, or at the very least, that its ghettoization in the latter realm was more justifiable on mathematical grounds than on perceptual ones? It would be foolish to make such pronouncements for all time, yet from where I sit with my peculiar set of experiences and historical vantage point, this certainly is a compelling hypothesis. What's for certain is that I have not seen the last of detractors of both idioms blaming an attraction to one on the other. They have my ilk all wrong, though: at least in my case, my interest in these two bodies of music developed concurrently, just like the bodies themselves did in the first half of the 20th century. Neither was a gateway drug to the other so much as each spoke to something that was simply "in the air" for me as a young adult, much as their concurrent development could be said to embody something that was "in the air" at that time.
The idea persists that a mere tolerance of, let alone an attraction to, music where unpartitioned major sevenths run rampant represents a pathology, a bad habit, an intellectual pose, and so on. When will it stop?
*A couple of glasses of wine and an audition of Lutoslawski's "Concerto for Orchestra" tend to make things occur to me rather rapidly.
25 December 2009
Concise or Crippled?
Readers of this blog might be surprised to learn that there were few times in either high school or college when I struggled to get a paper under the maximum word or page requirement. More often than not, the opposite was true, and more often than not, I simply could not bring myself to take what I felt was a strong paper and muck it up by B.S-ing my way into a few hundred more words or a couple more pages. I came to take pleasure in daring a teacher to give me a bad grade for a well-written paper that was a page too short, but that's not to say that I ever purposely wrote less than I could have just to find out. At the time, it seemed to me that conciseness was my greatest strength as a writer, and since no teacher of mine ever docked my grade solely because I didn't write enough, I gradually paid less and less attention to what the required length of a paper was, or if there was one at all. This, I think, is the only way to write, at least if you care even a little bit about the product.
It's only as a blogger that I've become the most unlikely of chatterboxes. In my defense, I'd say first and foremost that this is more a consequence of the format and context than of any change in my writing style. A blog post is commonly thought to reach epic, unmanageable proportions before it has become half the length of the average chapter in most any dead-tree scholarly work, a double-standard which everyone acknowledges yet no one seems to be interested in eradicating. In addition, I'm writing here about things I care about, not about the topic du jour in some ancient history class that I'm only taking because I have to. While I have, of course, stood up for breadth in education in this space before, I do have to say that forcing students to write about things they don't care about is the main reason that length requirements are thought to be necessary in the first place, and insofar as writing itself is a discipline which ought to receive substantial emphasis, it certainly would make things easier on everyone concerned if students were given greater leeway in choosing their topics.
I raise these points not to get further mired in the metablogging and navel-gazing that I sometimes lapse into here, but to use them as a jumping off point for discussing the issue of conciseness as it relates to music composition. Much as I've turned in many papers that were a page or so too short, I've also begun quite a few musical compositions with grand expectations only to suddenly realize shortly thereafter that I'm done, often while the piece is still quite short, in terms of real time at least. I've been pondering this quite a bit lately, and it raises the possibility of two interesting discussions, one musico-technical in nature, and the other social.
First things first. By the logic of mainstream academic composition pedagogy, this habit, handicap, conundrum, or whatever it is marks me rather clearly and decisively as someone who just hasn't studied hard enough or studied the right stuff. A composer is worth his salt only if he develops his ideas to their logical conclusion; we won't say exactly what that conclusion is, but since we had better look busy when it comes time for the administration to divide up the money between the composers, the cancer researchers, and the theoretical physicists, let's just say it had better look time-consuming. I'm being just a bit facetious, and about something I'm not exactly an expert on, but this dynamic most certainly exists and is more than negligible, if only a little bit more.
I don't doubt that the ability to maintain coherence across the span of an hour or more is an unusual skill which few composers possess, nor that such work should earn the composer significant status, nor that no one came out of the womb writing music that way, but rather learned to do so by a combination of intense study and trial and error. I also don't deny that I like me an hour-long coherent piece of music from time to time, and hope to write one myself some day. Having said all that, I'm not one bit ashamed of the two minute pieces I've written simply because they are only two minutes long. I believe that while there's no substitute for works like Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony or Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz," conciseness can be (though context is indeed everything) a virtue in music much as it is in words.
Because of the odd combination of temperament and circumstance that has kept me from having individual composition lessons with a credentialed academic, I've never gotten a second opinion (actually, I guess it would be a first opinion...) as to whether I'm concise or crippled. What I do have are the opinions of people I work with, which, to state the obvious, are not always candid since most of these people are, to some extent, friends as well as colleagues, but nonetheless undoubtedly have a grain of truth to them. This leads to the second, social aspect of the discussion. Bridging styles artistically means, for better or worse, that you must also bridge them socially, and I'm beginning to feel that this has become an increasingly maddening sideshow to the "real" work of writing music, booking shows, and giving performances. Of all the facets of this dance I do, the length issue is probably one of the more trivial, but it does come up quite often and has now officially joined the growing list of incompatibilities among the various scenes I claim to inhabit.
Most frustrating of all is that, as with blogging, I have by and large ceased to be known as the concise one and instead become known as the verbose one without changing anything about my work except for who's stuck playing it (or, more accurately, going from no one playing it to a few people putting up with it; I suppose a successful career as a composer, then, is when many people have to put up with it?). It seems that on top of all the stylistic and contextual/presentational issues that no two musical cliques can seem to agree upon, there's the issue of attention span, and as with all other such issues, I seem to represent both extremes at once depending on who you talk to.
I attended a concert of John Harbison's music last weekend; the composer was in attendance and stuck around afterwards for a post-concert Q and A session of the type that is all the rage these days. When asked to name the greatest challenge facing young composers today, he cited the need to digest and synthesize the diversity of musical styles that they espouse, a diversity which he implied (and I think he's probably right) either didn't exist or wasn't taken seriously when he was their age. It's hard enough to fathom accomplishing this in the purely artistic sense without layering on top of that the social minefield that must be navigated concurrently. It's something of a paradox that this social minefield exists not because most musicians aren't up to the artistic challenge, but rather because they're simply not interested in taking it in the first place. They each have their "thing" and that's what they do, end of story. Who am I to take issue with that? We all have to do what we love. If you love doing a few different things, though, you're posed with another conundrum: hold out for the chance to work with other like-minded generalists (if there even are any that match your interests that specifically), or work concurrently with different groups of specialists that probably hate each other, and, perhaps, end up hating you as well by virtue of your association with the rival clique.
If nothing else, I would say that I seldom find myself complaining that a piece of music is too short, but that I also reserve a special place in my own personal pantheon for pieces of music which achieve profundity in all the requisite ways and just happen to do so on an epic temporal scale. By virtue of my taste in music, the music I write probably should be moving toward this larger scale, but seeing that this only presents even greater potential to polarize friends, colleagues and listeners alike, I suppose it's not all bad that it hasn't happened yet.
It's only as a blogger that I've become the most unlikely of chatterboxes. In my defense, I'd say first and foremost that this is more a consequence of the format and context than of any change in my writing style. A blog post is commonly thought to reach epic, unmanageable proportions before it has become half the length of the average chapter in most any dead-tree scholarly work, a double-standard which everyone acknowledges yet no one seems to be interested in eradicating. In addition, I'm writing here about things I care about, not about the topic du jour in some ancient history class that I'm only taking because I have to. While I have, of course, stood up for breadth in education in this space before, I do have to say that forcing students to write about things they don't care about is the main reason that length requirements are thought to be necessary in the first place, and insofar as writing itself is a discipline which ought to receive substantial emphasis, it certainly would make things easier on everyone concerned if students were given greater leeway in choosing their topics.
I raise these points not to get further mired in the metablogging and navel-gazing that I sometimes lapse into here, but to use them as a jumping off point for discussing the issue of conciseness as it relates to music composition. Much as I've turned in many papers that were a page or so too short, I've also begun quite a few musical compositions with grand expectations only to suddenly realize shortly thereafter that I'm done, often while the piece is still quite short, in terms of real time at least. I've been pondering this quite a bit lately, and it raises the possibility of two interesting discussions, one musico-technical in nature, and the other social.
First things first. By the logic of mainstream academic composition pedagogy, this habit, handicap, conundrum, or whatever it is marks me rather clearly and decisively as someone who just hasn't studied hard enough or studied the right stuff. A composer is worth his salt only if he develops his ideas to their logical conclusion; we won't say exactly what that conclusion is, but since we had better look busy when it comes time for the administration to divide up the money between the composers, the cancer researchers, and the theoretical physicists, let's just say it had better look time-consuming. I'm being just a bit facetious, and about something I'm not exactly an expert on, but this dynamic most certainly exists and is more than negligible, if only a little bit more.
I don't doubt that the ability to maintain coherence across the span of an hour or more is an unusual skill which few composers possess, nor that such work should earn the composer significant status, nor that no one came out of the womb writing music that way, but rather learned to do so by a combination of intense study and trial and error. I also don't deny that I like me an hour-long coherent piece of music from time to time, and hope to write one myself some day. Having said all that, I'm not one bit ashamed of the two minute pieces I've written simply because they are only two minutes long. I believe that while there's no substitute for works like Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony or Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz," conciseness can be (though context is indeed everything) a virtue in music much as it is in words.
Because of the odd combination of temperament and circumstance that has kept me from having individual composition lessons with a credentialed academic, I've never gotten a second opinion (actually, I guess it would be a first opinion...) as to whether I'm concise or crippled. What I do have are the opinions of people I work with, which, to state the obvious, are not always candid since most of these people are, to some extent, friends as well as colleagues, but nonetheless undoubtedly have a grain of truth to them. This leads to the second, social aspect of the discussion. Bridging styles artistically means, for better or worse, that you must also bridge them socially, and I'm beginning to feel that this has become an increasingly maddening sideshow to the "real" work of writing music, booking shows, and giving performances. Of all the facets of this dance I do, the length issue is probably one of the more trivial, but it does come up quite often and has now officially joined the growing list of incompatibilities among the various scenes I claim to inhabit.
Most frustrating of all is that, as with blogging, I have by and large ceased to be known as the concise one and instead become known as the verbose one without changing anything about my work except for who's stuck playing it (or, more accurately, going from no one playing it to a few people putting up with it; I suppose a successful career as a composer, then, is when many people have to put up with it?). It seems that on top of all the stylistic and contextual/presentational issues that no two musical cliques can seem to agree upon, there's the issue of attention span, and as with all other such issues, I seem to represent both extremes at once depending on who you talk to.
I attended a concert of John Harbison's music last weekend; the composer was in attendance and stuck around afterwards for a post-concert Q and A session of the type that is all the rage these days. When asked to name the greatest challenge facing young composers today, he cited the need to digest and synthesize the diversity of musical styles that they espouse, a diversity which he implied (and I think he's probably right) either didn't exist or wasn't taken seriously when he was their age. It's hard enough to fathom accomplishing this in the purely artistic sense without layering on top of that the social minefield that must be navigated concurrently. It's something of a paradox that this social minefield exists not because most musicians aren't up to the artistic challenge, but rather because they're simply not interested in taking it in the first place. They each have their "thing" and that's what they do, end of story. Who am I to take issue with that? We all have to do what we love. If you love doing a few different things, though, you're posed with another conundrum: hold out for the chance to work with other like-minded generalists (if there even are any that match your interests that specifically), or work concurrently with different groups of specialists that probably hate each other, and, perhaps, end up hating you as well by virtue of your association with the rival clique.
If nothing else, I would say that I seldom find myself complaining that a piece of music is too short, but that I also reserve a special place in my own personal pantheon for pieces of music which achieve profundity in all the requisite ways and just happen to do so on an epic temporal scale. By virtue of my taste in music, the music I write probably should be moving toward this larger scale, but seeing that this only presents even greater potential to polarize friends, colleagues and listeners alike, I suppose it's not all bad that it hasn't happened yet.
21 December 2009
Generation Gap, and a Credo
There are plenty of things I'll never understand about events that took place before I was born, but I'm having an exceptionally hard time wrapping my head around the way composers who are roughly my parents' age talk about the musical epoch in which they came up, the era where dodecaphonism ruled the day, and where failure to sound "modern" enough would get you burned at the stake. Could it really have been that bad?
I ask this not out of spite but rather curiosity. I could do without dodecaphonism myself, and have no interest in defending it (though atonality broadly construed is another matter). I simply don't understand why it was so hard to grow some balls and do what you wanted to. The arts in general being as marginalized as they are today, it's certainly hard for someone my age to sympathize much with artists who fear marginalization so acutely. If you don't like being tackled, you don't play football. You could become a kicker as a compromise, but it's not your god-given right to make the team. Plus, you might get tackled anyway.
Of course, you can always argue that art isn't a choice, but rather something that chooses you. I hear that on some level, but I'd have to say that's a pretty darn entitled artist who would dare to go that particular route in the course of such a debate. The line between a self-aware purposefulness and a naive sense of entitlement can be hard to see sometimes, and because I wasn't around, I can't know just how truly oppressive things were circa the mid-twentieth century. Since I have been around, though, I've certainly heard a lot of bitching about it. Suffice it to say that my interest is piqued.
Long story short, if you want people to like you, don't become an artist. Just don't. If you do, you will first become bitter and frustrated at how hard it is to find two people who agree on anything, and second, you will end up abandoning your life's work trying to get them to agree on you. It's not popular taste or institutional myopia that's stifling, but rather the artist's desire to appease it at all costs. To do so merely validates its perceived authority, which is otherwise built on quicksand, but which in this way becomes self-fulfilling and is therefore perpetuated.
I ask this not out of spite but rather curiosity. I could do without dodecaphonism myself, and have no interest in defending it (though atonality broadly construed is another matter). I simply don't understand why it was so hard to grow some balls and do what you wanted to. The arts in general being as marginalized as they are today, it's certainly hard for someone my age to sympathize much with artists who fear marginalization so acutely. If you don't like being tackled, you don't play football. You could become a kicker as a compromise, but it's not your god-given right to make the team. Plus, you might get tackled anyway.
Of course, you can always argue that art isn't a choice, but rather something that chooses you. I hear that on some level, but I'd have to say that's a pretty darn entitled artist who would dare to go that particular route in the course of such a debate. The line between a self-aware purposefulness and a naive sense of entitlement can be hard to see sometimes, and because I wasn't around, I can't know just how truly oppressive things were circa the mid-twentieth century. Since I have been around, though, I've certainly heard a lot of bitching about it. Suffice it to say that my interest is piqued.
Long story short, if you want people to like you, don't become an artist. Just don't. If you do, you will first become bitter and frustrated at how hard it is to find two people who agree on anything, and second, you will end up abandoning your life's work trying to get them to agree on you. It's not popular taste or institutional myopia that's stifling, but rather the artist's desire to appease it at all costs. To do so merely validates its perceived authority, which is otherwise built on quicksand, but which in this way becomes self-fulfilling and is therefore perpetuated.
29 November 2009
Blog Month In Review: By The Numbers
Blog Month 2009 ends today, bringing to a close my somewhat more successful yet still slightly disappointing second effort at impersonating a real blogger (for my first effort, go here). I've not only set a new high water mark for posts in a month (23), but also for self-indulgence and capriciousness, I think. I'm also reasonably certain that I've both written and received more comments (of the thoughtful and thoughtless variety alike) this month than I normally do in a year.
It was a month suitably filled with excess, one during which I realized not only how much fun it can be to simply heap posts on top of posts, but also that I have neither the time to do so consistently nor the patience to do so thoughtfully. The flu-induced doldrums of the first couple of weeks notwithstanding, there were stretches later in the month where I simply could not write fast enough, where I found myself eager to get home from teaching or gigging or rehearsing simply to write the next entry. That happens to me occasionally, but it's quite rare and it doesn't usually last as long or cover as much ground as it did this month. It was quite exciting (yes, I'm easily amused) in a way that this project as a whole has not been since I started it, yet I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing. I simply cannot afford to devote this kind of time to blogging every month, but when I can, I prefer to invest in a few thoroughly argued missives on topics near and dear to me rather than simply spewing random thoughts onto my screen and rushing to post them without much revision or fact-checking. There's certainly no shortage of the latter if that's what your after, and so I don't feel the slightest bit guilty for refusing to add to it the other 11 months out of the year. I sure had fun this month, and I'm looking forward to the next one, but rest assured that Blog Month will remain only an occasional indulgence. We hope you'll stay tuned for that, as well as more of the arcane musico-philosophical pontification that has been and will remain our specialty around here.
At the outset, I promised to post at least one picture this month. Seeing that I've basically struck out to this point, I offer instead the following chart comparing my level of productivity this month to that of last year's maiden voyage:
Last year's rate appears in goldenrod and this year's in navy. The ideal rate of posting (daily) is also given, in maroon, for the sake of comparison. From the 14th of this month on, I nearly kept pace, but the flu had already set me back much too far to be able to catch up. In neither case did I keep up with the ideal rate for more than the first few days, although I'd forgotten that at one point last year, a flurry of activity on the 11th of the month actually put me ahead of the pace. In any case, I'm on a trajectory now, and so while I'm content to crawl back under my rock for a few months, I do look forward to next fall, when the pressure will be on, the anticipation will be palpable, and the stakes higher than ever.
As December rolls in and the dust settles, the current project will occupy the front page in its entirety, standing as a monument to self-indulgence, verbosity, and of course, fickleness. If you're a first time reader, please amuse yourself with the content below, but be careful not to form any unreasonable expectations. We reserve the right to break your heart in the unfortunate event that should occur.
It was a month suitably filled with excess, one during which I realized not only how much fun it can be to simply heap posts on top of posts, but also that I have neither the time to do so consistently nor the patience to do so thoughtfully. The flu-induced doldrums of the first couple of weeks notwithstanding, there were stretches later in the month where I simply could not write fast enough, where I found myself eager to get home from teaching or gigging or rehearsing simply to write the next entry. That happens to me occasionally, but it's quite rare and it doesn't usually last as long or cover as much ground as it did this month. It was quite exciting (yes, I'm easily amused) in a way that this project as a whole has not been since I started it, yet I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing. I simply cannot afford to devote this kind of time to blogging every month, but when I can, I prefer to invest in a few thoroughly argued missives on topics near and dear to me rather than simply spewing random thoughts onto my screen and rushing to post them without much revision or fact-checking. There's certainly no shortage of the latter if that's what your after, and so I don't feel the slightest bit guilty for refusing to add to it the other 11 months out of the year. I sure had fun this month, and I'm looking forward to the next one, but rest assured that Blog Month will remain only an occasional indulgence. We hope you'll stay tuned for that, as well as more of the arcane musico-philosophical pontification that has been and will remain our specialty around here.
At the outset, I promised to post at least one picture this month. Seeing that I've basically struck out to this point, I offer instead the following chart comparing my level of productivity this month to that of last year's maiden voyage:
Last year's rate appears in goldenrod and this year's in navy. The ideal rate of posting (daily) is also given, in maroon, for the sake of comparison. From the 14th of this month on, I nearly kept pace, but the flu had already set me back much too far to be able to catch up. In neither case did I keep up with the ideal rate for more than the first few days, although I'd forgotten that at one point last year, a flurry of activity on the 11th of the month actually put me ahead of the pace. In any case, I'm on a trajectory now, and so while I'm content to crawl back under my rock for a few months, I do look forward to next fall, when the pressure will be on, the anticipation will be palpable, and the stakes higher than ever.
As December rolls in and the dust settles, the current project will occupy the front page in its entirety, standing as a monument to self-indulgence, verbosity, and of course, fickleness. If you're a first time reader, please amuse yourself with the content below, but be careful not to form any unreasonable expectations. We reserve the right to break your heart in the unfortunate event that should occur.
28 November 2009
Attendance
I went to a concert last night and it was really good. The thing is, I almost didn't go. I had no obligations of any kind yesterday, a rare occurrence these days, and one that inevitably leads me to hunker down and get to work on playing and writing things that I actually want to play and write. I'm not always in the mood for that kind of work, nor do I often have a whole lot of time for it, so when those two things align, I can be difficult to roust.
Over the years when these conditions have presented themselves, I've chosen overwhelmingly to stay home and keep working, and this, among other factors, has made me into quite the infrequent concertgoer, so much so apparently that I seem to have acquired exactly that reputation with a few of my colleagues. Things were not always like this. I was an avid and frequent attendee of live music late in high school and into college. I had really just discovered my penchant for music (making it as well as listening to it) for the first time, and the excitement of this stage of my life is something that, sadly, I'll never experience again. After a while, though, that thrill wore off, and I realize now that the biggest mistake I made was not taking it upon myself to go looking for new things to hear. Instead, I simply got bored and mostly stopped going.
That's the short version, but there were (and are) myriad other factors at work. First of all, for many years, I made the mistake of chasing high-profile, big-name, hot-ticket jazz events by so-and-so's latest supergroup. Frankly, most of those concerts absolutely stunk, and I wish I had back the time and money I wasted on them. It has since become obvious to me that I needed to do the work or ferreting out what was worth hearing for myself rather than merely swallowing the promotion, but at the time, I merely got disillusioned with everything and became less and less apt to leave the house. I've since come to say (sarcastically, but only a little bit) that I won't listen to anything by someone I've heard of. It also seems to me that this advice is also increasingly apt in the realm of art.
Secondly, though this took a while to happen, I became profoundly disillusioned with acoustics. For a while, it seemed like every show I went to was an acoustical nightmare. This was partially a result of hearing so many of the afore mentioned nationally touring jazz acts in concert halls rather than clubs, but also of some particularly horrendous club acoustics, as well as the occasional poor decision by a performer. I've come to loathe my own shortcomings in understanding the basic physical principles of sound, as well as the fact that music education, whether at the elementary or the graduate level or anywhere in between, rarely so much as scratches the surface of this topic. I'm coming to believe that this is our greatest shortcoming as musicians, an utter ignorance of how our work is governed by the laws of physics. Even if that's going too far, though, it's safe to say that in absence of better rooms to play in, we really ought to do a better job of managing the ones we have.
Third, I did not turn 21 until I had started my 4th year of college, so up until that time, I wasn't even allowed into some of the places where the real shit was going down. I've never entirely shed my resentment of that fact, and I have always looked forward to a day when I might wield enough credibility to impose an all ages policy on any venue I play at. That may never happen, but even so, it's an issue all of us ought to be more cognizant of, along with the artificially late start times that have become a badge of hipness many circles despite the fact that the musical cultures which spawned them are largely dead.
Fourth, I'll just come right out and say that I went to a music school that treats its students like kindergarteners. Required concert attendance was used as a bludgeon against a student body comprised largely of people who didn't belong there, the vast majority of whom never finished their music degrees. The environment was downright toxic on occasion, and so the naive, self-directed concertgoer I was in high school quickly became a cynical, perfunctory one in college. It's worth noting that performing in these required concerts for an audience comprised exclusively of cynical, perfunctory listeners was even more unpleasant.
Fifth, I've had a couple of different non-musical day jobs after college, and both tended to present me with the same galling choice: practice or go to a concert. Many many days, I simply could not do both, and as my freelance career picked up and my obligations therein became more significant, it became less frequent that choosing the concert was even a tenable option. I've joked before that playing the tuba has ruined my life, and this just is one of those situations that spawned that joke. I was never happy about it, I just didn't really have a choice.
I've shed the day job thing for the moment, and so I've been making more of an effort to get out and hear things. This brings me back, though, to the simple and more important fact that while the things I listed above all played a role, I've always been a full-fledged homebody and a little bit of a workaholic to boot. As such, it only took the slightest bit of cynicism creeping in to almost completely negate my interest in going to hear music in person, and even now that I've emerged from that stage of my life, I still have trouble kicking myself out the door most of the time. When I can buy tickets in advance of the show, that does the trick. The disincentive to waste money is always powerful. Most of the shows I want to hear are not organized that way, however. It's why I've become a marginally more loyal SPCO attendee, for even at the discounted prices I hold out for each year, I still can't justify merely skipping the concert, nor, truthfully, do I really want to anyway. I'm just a little but obsessive about getting things done, and I still enjoy making music enough that sometimes listening falls by the wayside when there is a conflict. I am so very glad I went last night, though. I had it on the calendar for a few weeks to remind myself, but knowing it would be the day after Thanksgiving and I had nothing to do but hole up in my room with my tuba, computer, and iPod, I sensed danger almost as soon as I heard about the gig. It was one of those days where my innate predispositions have so often trumped my acquired interests. I should say also that it's not any easier to get out the door when what stands between you and the concert is a 30 minute bike ride in 30 degree weather. I didn't even have a car until I was 22, and biking to concerts had long since become force of habit, even for most of the winter, so it's amazing to me how soft I've gotten by virtue of having a car for the last several years. Perhaps only a native Minnesotan could think so, but the weather last night was absolutely beautiful, crystal clear and not a breath of wind, at least on the way up there. Coming back, there was indeed just a breath, but it was right in my face and things had cooled off noticeably by that time, so that was less enjoyable. Nevertheless, I got some much needed exercise, reduced my carbon footprint, and saved some cash on gas. I remember when that was the norm, and it scares me how much I sometimes dread cold weather riding these days when I used to just man up and brave it. So, in short, I went primarily to hear good music, and secondarily to get some exercise, and I got exactly what I wanted in both cases. I'm starting to succeed as a concertgoer again, and that's a really good feeling after years of severely premature cynicism. Let me tell you some things that I didn't take into consideration, though. First of all, though these were local artists, I did not go to hear them simply because they were local. I've had enough of the "Buy Local" line being applied to art as if it were food, and though I myself made an analogy above between art and food politics, I think it stops here rather decisively. Art is not to be judged by a standard so unrelated to the aesthetic experience. To do so, one has to believe that art's functional utility reigns supreme over its aesthetic properties, or put more bluntly, that beauty doesn't matter. To support artists for non-aesthetic reasons is merely to enable the perpetuation of mediocrity by rewarding social rather than technical virtuosity. We'd do better by both art and ourselves to simply follow our noses instead.
There are local artists I can't get enough of, and many others where once was enough, but the fact that they live and work in the same general area of the planet as I do is meaningless to me. Each such local scene has its ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses, surpluses and deficits, and it would be ludicrous to expect each and every citizen of such a place to assimilate these precise tastes out of deference to art and artists chosen for them by mere happenstance. Whether or not I can hear Lutoslawski's "Mi-Parti" played by a local orchestra any night of the week has no bearing on my opinion of the piece. To parrot the "Buy Local" line as if the very perpetuation of art depends on it is to endorse an unsustainable, "growth for its own sake" philosophy whereby the total quantity of art is more important than its perceived quality, and to impose an uncomfortable dishonesty on anyone who might be tempted to think for themselves.
Over the years when these conditions have presented themselves, I've chosen overwhelmingly to stay home and keep working, and this, among other factors, has made me into quite the infrequent concertgoer, so much so apparently that I seem to have acquired exactly that reputation with a few of my colleagues. Things were not always like this. I was an avid and frequent attendee of live music late in high school and into college. I had really just discovered my penchant for music (making it as well as listening to it) for the first time, and the excitement of this stage of my life is something that, sadly, I'll never experience again. After a while, though, that thrill wore off, and I realize now that the biggest mistake I made was not taking it upon myself to go looking for new things to hear. Instead, I simply got bored and mostly stopped going.
That's the short version, but there were (and are) myriad other factors at work. First of all, for many years, I made the mistake of chasing high-profile, big-name, hot-ticket jazz events by so-and-so's latest supergroup. Frankly, most of those concerts absolutely stunk, and I wish I had back the time and money I wasted on them. It has since become obvious to me that I needed to do the work or ferreting out what was worth hearing for myself rather than merely swallowing the promotion, but at the time, I merely got disillusioned with everything and became less and less apt to leave the house. I've since come to say (sarcastically, but only a little bit) that I won't listen to anything by someone I've heard of. It also seems to me that this advice is also increasingly apt in the realm of art.
Secondly, though this took a while to happen, I became profoundly disillusioned with acoustics. For a while, it seemed like every show I went to was an acoustical nightmare. This was partially a result of hearing so many of the afore mentioned nationally touring jazz acts in concert halls rather than clubs, but also of some particularly horrendous club acoustics, as well as the occasional poor decision by a performer. I've come to loathe my own shortcomings in understanding the basic physical principles of sound, as well as the fact that music education, whether at the elementary or the graduate level or anywhere in between, rarely so much as scratches the surface of this topic. I'm coming to believe that this is our greatest shortcoming as musicians, an utter ignorance of how our work is governed by the laws of physics. Even if that's going too far, though, it's safe to say that in absence of better rooms to play in, we really ought to do a better job of managing the ones we have.
Third, I did not turn 21 until I had started my 4th year of college, so up until that time, I wasn't even allowed into some of the places where the real shit was going down. I've never entirely shed my resentment of that fact, and I have always looked forward to a day when I might wield enough credibility to impose an all ages policy on any venue I play at. That may never happen, but even so, it's an issue all of us ought to be more cognizant of, along with the artificially late start times that have become a badge of hipness many circles despite the fact that the musical cultures which spawned them are largely dead.
Fourth, I'll just come right out and say that I went to a music school that treats its students like kindergarteners. Required concert attendance was used as a bludgeon against a student body comprised largely of people who didn't belong there, the vast majority of whom never finished their music degrees. The environment was downright toxic on occasion, and so the naive, self-directed concertgoer I was in high school quickly became a cynical, perfunctory one in college. It's worth noting that performing in these required concerts for an audience comprised exclusively of cynical, perfunctory listeners was even more unpleasant.
Fifth, I've had a couple of different non-musical day jobs after college, and both tended to present me with the same galling choice: practice or go to a concert. Many many days, I simply could not do both, and as my freelance career picked up and my obligations therein became more significant, it became less frequent that choosing the concert was even a tenable option. I've joked before that playing the tuba has ruined my life, and this just is one of those situations that spawned that joke. I was never happy about it, I just didn't really have a choice.
I've shed the day job thing for the moment, and so I've been making more of an effort to get out and hear things. This brings me back, though, to the simple and more important fact that while the things I listed above all played a role, I've always been a full-fledged homebody and a little bit of a workaholic to boot. As such, it only took the slightest bit of cynicism creeping in to almost completely negate my interest in going to hear music in person, and even now that I've emerged from that stage of my life, I still have trouble kicking myself out the door most of the time. When I can buy tickets in advance of the show, that does the trick. The disincentive to waste money is always powerful. Most of the shows I want to hear are not organized that way, however. It's why I've become a marginally more loyal SPCO attendee, for even at the discounted prices I hold out for each year, I still can't justify merely skipping the concert, nor, truthfully, do I really want to anyway. I'm just a little but obsessive about getting things done, and I still enjoy making music enough that sometimes listening falls by the wayside when there is a conflict. I am so very glad I went last night, though. I had it on the calendar for a few weeks to remind myself, but knowing it would be the day after Thanksgiving and I had nothing to do but hole up in my room with my tuba, computer, and iPod, I sensed danger almost as soon as I heard about the gig. It was one of those days where my innate predispositions have so often trumped my acquired interests. I should say also that it's not any easier to get out the door when what stands between you and the concert is a 30 minute bike ride in 30 degree weather. I didn't even have a car until I was 22, and biking to concerts had long since become force of habit, even for most of the winter, so it's amazing to me how soft I've gotten by virtue of having a car for the last several years. Perhaps only a native Minnesotan could think so, but the weather last night was absolutely beautiful, crystal clear and not a breath of wind, at least on the way up there. Coming back, there was indeed just a breath, but it was right in my face and things had cooled off noticeably by that time, so that was less enjoyable. Nevertheless, I got some much needed exercise, reduced my carbon footprint, and saved some cash on gas. I remember when that was the norm, and it scares me how much I sometimes dread cold weather riding these days when I used to just man up and brave it. So, in short, I went primarily to hear good music, and secondarily to get some exercise, and I got exactly what I wanted in both cases. I'm starting to succeed as a concertgoer again, and that's a really good feeling after years of severely premature cynicism. Let me tell you some things that I didn't take into consideration, though. First of all, though these were local artists, I did not go to hear them simply because they were local. I've had enough of the "Buy Local" line being applied to art as if it were food, and though I myself made an analogy above between art and food politics, I think it stops here rather decisively. Art is not to be judged by a standard so unrelated to the aesthetic experience. To do so, one has to believe that art's functional utility reigns supreme over its aesthetic properties, or put more bluntly, that beauty doesn't matter. To support artists for non-aesthetic reasons is merely to enable the perpetuation of mediocrity by rewarding social rather than technical virtuosity. We'd do better by both art and ourselves to simply follow our noses instead.
There are local artists I can't get enough of, and many others where once was enough, but the fact that they live and work in the same general area of the planet as I do is meaningless to me. Each such local scene has its ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses, surpluses and deficits, and it would be ludicrous to expect each and every citizen of such a place to assimilate these precise tastes out of deference to art and artists chosen for them by mere happenstance. Whether or not I can hear Lutoslawski's "Mi-Parti" played by a local orchestra any night of the week has no bearing on my opinion of the piece. To parrot the "Buy Local" line as if the very perpetuation of art depends on it is to endorse an unsustainable, "growth for its own sake" philosophy whereby the total quantity of art is more important than its perceived quality, and to impose an uncomfortable dishonesty on anyone who might be tempted to think for themselves.
27 November 2009
Holi Crap
The holiday season in the U.S. has long since become more trouble than it's worth, and almost no one seems to be shy about saying that anymore. Much has been made of the capitalist co-optation of the season, the fact that most people don't really want to see their extended families, and the weight they end up gaining from gorging on egg nog, candy canes, pies, and smoked ham for weeks on end. I feel much the same way about all of these things, but even in sum, they don't bother me half as much as the simple fact that life gets extraordinarily difficult for the final 6 weeks or so of each calendar year, whether you give a rodent's hind quarters about the holidays or not.
For the people tasked with coordinating and bringing off their family's holiday celebrations, the recuperative, leisure-based aspect of the holidays is sacrificed entirely, and many emerge from it more frazzled than they were when they last left work. But even for the rest of us, who couldn't care less about "the reason for the season" and have few if any significant holiday obligations, the artificially escalated hustle and bustle makes simple things maddeningly complicated. We just want to be left alone to do what we were doing before, but sometimes we can't because the world around us has gone ape shit.
Case in point:
I have a recording session on Monday that requires me to insert and remove my tuba mute silently. The cork on the thing is ancient, and so it squeaks quite loudly when it touches the sides of the bell. You can even get a blood-curdling screech out of it by twisting it from side to side, which can't be good for either the lacquer or the cork, but I am a tuba player after all, and so I sometimes can't resist the perverse attraction to making sounds that will cause anyone within a mile radius to perk up. I've been putting off applying whatever it is I'll eventually decide to apply to the cork to solve this problem. Gluing felt and rubbing charcoal have both been suggested, but it seems to me that the cleanest and easiest solution would simply be pieces of tape. Specifically, white athletic tape would be ideal, since the non-sticky side of it is very fabric-like, but I cannot seem to find mine anywhere in the house. If it fails to materialize soon, I will be forced to travel to a sporting goods store to acquire some more. The problem with that is that this is the busiest shopping weekend of the year and I want no part of it, especially not in a sporting goods store, and not because I don't absolutely love sporting goods stores, but because I don't totally love the kind of people that I'm likely to meet in them. And there will be a lot of them.
Case In Point #2:
I've mostly given up on composition contests at this point, but since a combination of factors have aligned recently resulting in a very good recording of a piece I feel really good about, I'm looking into entering a few of them for the first time in a while. The problem with that? Many of the deadlines fall very early in the new year, meaning that unless I want to mail things last minute, I have to brave the post office at the absolute worst possible time. And it's not just a matter of suffering through the long lines: the only entry to a contest I've ever sent that I know for a fact got lost in the mail was sent at this time of year. I usually just use "Delivery Confirmation," which simply tells you when (and perhaps if) you're stuff was delivered, and doesn't provide any recourse if it's not. After the tracking history had been dormant for a week or so, I contacted the contest coordinator and he confirmed that it was not received. This is the busiest time of year for the post office, and people make mistakes. I'm not out for blood here, I just don't want to have to wait in line forever, pay extra for certified mail, and/or pay to print and send a score more than once. It sucks, and it's all the holidays' fault.
To top it off, I endured a bit of poetic justice yesterday at Thanksgiving dinner. A few years ago, my parents and I officially fell off the holiday boat and began going out for Thanksgiving dinner. We've been to the same place each time, and it's always quite good. We even had the same server this year as last, and she remembered us. What was funny is that for the last half hour or so that we were there, the Muzak machine serenaded us (me, specifically, I'm sure) with an all-Beatles final set. I wasn't miserable, nor was I particularly happy, but I certainly had a private laugh about it in light of recent discussions here. Having worked in a few Muzak-polluted spaces over the years, I'd bet money that there's Christmas music emanating from those very same speakers as I write this. If you've been following things around here, you know that there's some poetic justice in that for me, too.
For the people tasked with coordinating and bringing off their family's holiday celebrations, the recuperative, leisure-based aspect of the holidays is sacrificed entirely, and many emerge from it more frazzled than they were when they last left work. But even for the rest of us, who couldn't care less about "the reason for the season" and have few if any significant holiday obligations, the artificially escalated hustle and bustle makes simple things maddeningly complicated. We just want to be left alone to do what we were doing before, but sometimes we can't because the world around us has gone ape shit.
Case in point:
I have a recording session on Monday that requires me to insert and remove my tuba mute silently. The cork on the thing is ancient, and so it squeaks quite loudly when it touches the sides of the bell. You can even get a blood-curdling screech out of it by twisting it from side to side, which can't be good for either the lacquer or the cork, but I am a tuba player after all, and so I sometimes can't resist the perverse attraction to making sounds that will cause anyone within a mile radius to perk up. I've been putting off applying whatever it is I'll eventually decide to apply to the cork to solve this problem. Gluing felt and rubbing charcoal have both been suggested, but it seems to me that the cleanest and easiest solution would simply be pieces of tape. Specifically, white athletic tape would be ideal, since the non-sticky side of it is very fabric-like, but I cannot seem to find mine anywhere in the house. If it fails to materialize soon, I will be forced to travel to a sporting goods store to acquire some more. The problem with that is that this is the busiest shopping weekend of the year and I want no part of it, especially not in a sporting goods store, and not because I don't absolutely love sporting goods stores, but because I don't totally love the kind of people that I'm likely to meet in them. And there will be a lot of them.
Case In Point #2:
I've mostly given up on composition contests at this point, but since a combination of factors have aligned recently resulting in a very good recording of a piece I feel really good about, I'm looking into entering a few of them for the first time in a while. The problem with that? Many of the deadlines fall very early in the new year, meaning that unless I want to mail things last minute, I have to brave the post office at the absolute worst possible time. And it's not just a matter of suffering through the long lines: the only entry to a contest I've ever sent that I know for a fact got lost in the mail was sent at this time of year. I usually just use "Delivery Confirmation," which simply tells you when (and perhaps if) you're stuff was delivered, and doesn't provide any recourse if it's not. After the tracking history had been dormant for a week or so, I contacted the contest coordinator and he confirmed that it was not received. This is the busiest time of year for the post office, and people make mistakes. I'm not out for blood here, I just don't want to have to wait in line forever, pay extra for certified mail, and/or pay to print and send a score more than once. It sucks, and it's all the holidays' fault.
To top it off, I endured a bit of poetic justice yesterday at Thanksgiving dinner. A few years ago, my parents and I officially fell off the holiday boat and began going out for Thanksgiving dinner. We've been to the same place each time, and it's always quite good. We even had the same server this year as last, and she remembered us. What was funny is that for the last half hour or so that we were there, the Muzak machine serenaded us (me, specifically, I'm sure) with an all-Beatles final set. I wasn't miserable, nor was I particularly happy, but I certainly had a private laugh about it in light of recent discussions here. Having worked in a few Muzak-polluted spaces over the years, I'd bet money that there's Christmas music emanating from those very same speakers as I write this. If you've been following things around here, you know that there's some poetic justice in that for me, too.
26 November 2009
Yeah, but is it Pop?
I soon realized that in the course of the previous discussion on pop, I omitted an important predilection of mine that happens to come from the pop world, that being Jimi Hendrix. Not that I'm any kind of Hendrix expert, but I do seriously dig his music. I'd venture that Hendrix's appeal is almost as universal as The Beatles', and also that it's more universal than the Beatles' among people who also happen to like atonal, modernist, and/or avant-garde music (whatever that is). If Dan had asked about Hendrix instead of the Beatles, he would have essentially been asking the same thing about me, I think, but he would have gotten a very different (and yes, probably shorter) answer, and that whole discussion would have gone in a completely different direction. Oh well.
For what it's worth, brass quintets, wedding bands, jazz combos, and pops orchestras don't cover Hendrix nearly as excessively as they cover The Beatles. That's no doubt in large part because they also do so far less successfully and they know it. Rock musicians have significantly less shame about imitating Hendrix, though they probably shouldn't. The Beatles certainly had their extramusical trials and tribulations, but perhaps Hendrix's were more well-known as they happened, and more of the kind that aren't typically discussed in polite company. I think all of these things probably factor into why The Beatles's music is seemingly thought to transcend instrumentation the way Bach's does, while Hendrix is just as popular but not covered as often or as well. I'd like to think that I could separate my own unpleasant experiences with poor imitations of an artist from my overall opinion of them, and certainly that I could prevent extramusical issues from coloring that opinion, but I'm human, and that may not be the case here. I really don't know. Gil Evans did an album of Hendrix's music that left me cold (frigid, in fact), but I still dig the original.
Stevie Wonder is an artist that many jazz musicians have covered, from Dave Pietro to Joe Gilman to The New Power Trio to Dan's own group Frankhouse. I'm not so set in my ways that I ignore and deny these kinds of trends. In fact, as I've said, the more pop music I can find that I actually like, the less I'll feel like a social outcast, and that can only be a good thing. And if so many otherwise like-minded people are into something, you'd think that would be a hint worth taking. To that end, I had the chance to investigate a Stevie Wonder box set while housesitting for a friend last year. When I saw it sitting on the rack, I got really excited. This was my chance! Well, I had to stop listening after a while. It just wasn't for me. It's galling in a way, yet not entirely surprising that while I really dig many of the jazz covers of his music that I've heard, I couldn't make it through an entire disc of the originals. Too bad for me, I guess.
I mentioned before that prog rock seems to float my boat. I'm not sure that really counts as pop music, though. Some pop people spew even more venom at prog rock than they do at classical music and jazz. It not only incorporates many elements of those more high-falutin' styles, but also hits closer to home by virtue of still being rooted, if not in some small way, in the rock and/or pop aesthetic(s). I was perusing some blogs that I don't get around to reading all that often and stumbled on a couple of posts over at Acousmata about a couple of prog groups I didn't know about:
Magma
Univers Zero
I dig both of these tracks a lot, and I'll definitely be investigating both of these bands' work more extensively at some point.
It's hard to talk intelligently about structure when you've only listened to something one time, but if there are profound large-scale structural concepts worthy of a classical musicologist's attention at work here, I missed them the first time. In fact, while I definitely dug the Univers Zero track more, the scattered nature of the structure bothered me a bit. That's usually my first and only complaint about the prog bands I'm into, which scares me, because for a long time, I resented the classical approach to form and believed in, essentially, doing what you want in that respect. It's not doing Kyle Gann's writing any sort of justice to lump him in with the clunky statement I just made, but if you read his blog, you know that he's written intelligently and repeatedly about composers (himself included) who have rebelled against such traditional formal strictures. What scares me is that while I nod in agreement when I read things like that, and always have, nonetheless, as I get older and listen to and write more music, I find myself hurtling towards the traditional perspective. It's bizarre.
By virtue of that traditional perspective, my trajectory is wholly unremarkable and quite predictable. Young people don't "get it" because they don't know anything, and once they learn something (if not everything), they see the light. It raises a question that's on the tip of most everyone's tongues these days when the pop and classical worlds collide: is this process an inherently positive, predictable, and universal one by which each and everyone of us can become an astute, structure-oriented listener and musician simply by trying, or does it represent the artificial domestication of the listener, their mere social initiation into a rarefied world of musical elitism where other perspectives are unduly dismissed as too unsophisticated?
I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that as I gain experience, structure comes to matter more. I'm more aware of it when I listen, and I agonize over it more when I write. In all but the most extreme cases, it's not enough to turn me off entirely from a piece of music that I have only good reactions to otherwise, but I wonder if the current trajectory, assuming it continues, doesn't dictate that sooner or later that will change? That thought scares me a bit, though there's nothing I can do about it. Clinging to previously held beliefs simply to avoid admitting you were wrong is always a bad idea; labeling those who are willing to admit as much as "wishy-washy" also misses the point; and purposely remaining ignorant or cutting oneself off from the learning process when it becomes obvious that this process is changing your long-held beliefs is stooping quite low, dare I say it, in a pop sort of way. That's my philosophy with regard not only to the question of structure, but also of taste. If there's a time in my future when I will worship The Beatles, then so be it.
As a parting shot, check out this band from Vancouver:
Winning
A friend hipped me to them the other night, describing it as "Free Emo." That sounds about right. I could listen to this by myself in a quiet, dark room without getting bored, the same way I listen to Lutoslawski, Ives and Monk. But is it Pop?
For what it's worth, brass quintets, wedding bands, jazz combos, and pops orchestras don't cover Hendrix nearly as excessively as they cover The Beatles. That's no doubt in large part because they also do so far less successfully and they know it. Rock musicians have significantly less shame about imitating Hendrix, though they probably shouldn't. The Beatles certainly had their extramusical trials and tribulations, but perhaps Hendrix's were more well-known as they happened, and more of the kind that aren't typically discussed in polite company. I think all of these things probably factor into why The Beatles's music is seemingly thought to transcend instrumentation the way Bach's does, while Hendrix is just as popular but not covered as often or as well. I'd like to think that I could separate my own unpleasant experiences with poor imitations of an artist from my overall opinion of them, and certainly that I could prevent extramusical issues from coloring that opinion, but I'm human, and that may not be the case here. I really don't know. Gil Evans did an album of Hendrix's music that left me cold (frigid, in fact), but I still dig the original.
Stevie Wonder is an artist that many jazz musicians have covered, from Dave Pietro to Joe Gilman to The New Power Trio to Dan's own group Frankhouse. I'm not so set in my ways that I ignore and deny these kinds of trends. In fact, as I've said, the more pop music I can find that I actually like, the less I'll feel like a social outcast, and that can only be a good thing. And if so many otherwise like-minded people are into something, you'd think that would be a hint worth taking. To that end, I had the chance to investigate a Stevie Wonder box set while housesitting for a friend last year. When I saw it sitting on the rack, I got really excited. This was my chance! Well, I had to stop listening after a while. It just wasn't for me. It's galling in a way, yet not entirely surprising that while I really dig many of the jazz covers of his music that I've heard, I couldn't make it through an entire disc of the originals. Too bad for me, I guess.
I mentioned before that prog rock seems to float my boat. I'm not sure that really counts as pop music, though. Some pop people spew even more venom at prog rock than they do at classical music and jazz. It not only incorporates many elements of those more high-falutin' styles, but also hits closer to home by virtue of still being rooted, if not in some small way, in the rock and/or pop aesthetic(s). I was perusing some blogs that I don't get around to reading all that often and stumbled on a couple of posts over at Acousmata about a couple of prog groups I didn't know about:
Magma
Univers Zero
I dig both of these tracks a lot, and I'll definitely be investigating both of these bands' work more extensively at some point.
It's hard to talk intelligently about structure when you've only listened to something one time, but if there are profound large-scale structural concepts worthy of a classical musicologist's attention at work here, I missed them the first time. In fact, while I definitely dug the Univers Zero track more, the scattered nature of the structure bothered me a bit. That's usually my first and only complaint about the prog bands I'm into, which scares me, because for a long time, I resented the classical approach to form and believed in, essentially, doing what you want in that respect. It's not doing Kyle Gann's writing any sort of justice to lump him in with the clunky statement I just made, but if you read his blog, you know that he's written intelligently and repeatedly about composers (himself included) who have rebelled against such traditional formal strictures. What scares me is that while I nod in agreement when I read things like that, and always have, nonetheless, as I get older and listen to and write more music, I find myself hurtling towards the traditional perspective. It's bizarre.
By virtue of that traditional perspective, my trajectory is wholly unremarkable and quite predictable. Young people don't "get it" because they don't know anything, and once they learn something (if not everything), they see the light. It raises a question that's on the tip of most everyone's tongues these days when the pop and classical worlds collide: is this process an inherently positive, predictable, and universal one by which each and everyone of us can become an astute, structure-oriented listener and musician simply by trying, or does it represent the artificial domestication of the listener, their mere social initiation into a rarefied world of musical elitism where other perspectives are unduly dismissed as too unsophisticated?
I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that as I gain experience, structure comes to matter more. I'm more aware of it when I listen, and I agonize over it more when I write. In all but the most extreme cases, it's not enough to turn me off entirely from a piece of music that I have only good reactions to otherwise, but I wonder if the current trajectory, assuming it continues, doesn't dictate that sooner or later that will change? That thought scares me a bit, though there's nothing I can do about it. Clinging to previously held beliefs simply to avoid admitting you were wrong is always a bad idea; labeling those who are willing to admit as much as "wishy-washy" also misses the point; and purposely remaining ignorant or cutting oneself off from the learning process when it becomes obvious that this process is changing your long-held beliefs is stooping quite low, dare I say it, in a pop sort of way. That's my philosophy with regard not only to the question of structure, but also of taste. If there's a time in my future when I will worship The Beatles, then so be it.
As a parting shot, check out this band from Vancouver:
Winning
A friend hipped me to them the other night, describing it as "Free Emo." That sounds about right. I could listen to this by myself in a quiet, dark room without getting bored, the same way I listen to Lutoslawski, Ives and Monk. But is it Pop?
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