Substance: A Rant

I have always tried to make my musical life one of substance. I have always tried to make the phrases that I play and the phrases that I write reflect the statement attributed to Coleridge, "Nothing can permanently please that does not contain within itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise." In 2012 I wrote a post about it that you might like to read. Five years is almost a lifetime in the digital world.

The idea of substance still makes sense in what I call the "real world" (as opposed to the digital world) but I am far behind the times, and I guess I have been for my whole life. The "digital world" is now a serious part of the "real world," and I have observed that it is nearly impossible to navigate musical waters (i.e. have a career in music) without doing so through digital pathways. And the problem with using digital pathways is that surface appearance becomes everything. And if you don't keep "repaving" those digital pathways, everything you do vanishes into less than thin air. It seems to take more effort to promote a musical "brand" (whatever that is) than it does to do the work of building and maintaining a musical vocabulary and the necessary technique to express what you need to express.

My first experiences of life with the internet had to do with finding like-minded people. It was truly thrilling to communicate with people who shared my (sometimes rarified) musical interests. Back in the glory days of newsgroups and email, I often had several serious correspondences going. Now I have to wade through (i.e. delete) scores of solicitations in order to find the work-related email messages that come into my inbox.

Another sad truth is that most of my email correspondence partners are no longer living.

But oddly through all of this, the music I love remains the same. Yesterday I had a rehearsal of the Haydn "Kaiser" Quartet. Every phrase of the music, written 220 years ago, retains the same set of possibilities for intimate interaction, and it holds the same surprises, cyclical references, treats, and rewards. And they are there every time you play them. Everything in the piece contains within itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise.

As individual people there are substantial things that we seek out and recognize when we find them (absolute emotions like love and hate). I wonder, however, if as a larger culture we have become more superficial and less substantial in the way we face the world. I wonder if the speed and ease with which news comes to us (both big news and small) dulls our senses, and makes it more difficult to give the weight of our feelings the time they deserve.

Rant on Immortality

My mother, who painted the above watercolor, is very much alive, but she no longer paints because she can no longer see. When I told her that I wanted to put her paintings on a blog so that her friends and acquaintances could see her work, she remarked that she wasn't able to get much money for the paintings she sold because she was a living artist. I wonder why is it that after someone dies their work becomes more valuable. It is because there is a finite end to their output? My mother's finite end to her work came when she could no longer see lines and colors, but I believe talking about her work with people enriches her life as well as the lives of people who are able to see it.

Why is it that people so often wait until someone is no longer alive to voice appreciation for a body of work, be it musical, literary, or artistic? Much of our human culture seems to be obsessed with the idea of some kind of afterlife and/or some kind of immortality, but not being a person who believes in an afterlife or immortality, I know that will not derive any pleasure or benefit from having a posthumous career. Many people struggle to get their work known beyond a small circle of friends, but more often than not it isn't until an obituary hits the newspapers or the internet that people in the "outside world" pay attention.

Writing music is only part of music making. A piece of music, no matter who wrote it (or Whom) only comes alive when people play it. A good composer tries to make an interpretation inevitable through the writing, but the composer's input really stops once the music is notated and distributed or published. A piece of music is a gift to musicians of future generations, but once the composer's life is over s/he will never know where it is played, or by whom.

Recordings give an illusion that a person who is no longer alive is somehow present. The larger the musical personality, the more convincing the illusion will be. But it is still an illusion. Recordings give the illusion that someone who is alive but not within earshot is present. Writing is similar. I still find it miraculous that someone's "voice" can be transmitted into another person's head centuries upon centuries after the writer put pen to paper (or knife to tablet). A writer can also transmit his or her written voice instantly to just about anywhere in the world.

A visual artist can capture an image (moving or still) of a time that can never be revisited, but it is just an illusion because no time can be revisited. We move on and unconsciously filter our memories so that we have room for new thoughts. We need visual art to remind us of where we have been, or not been.

All we really have is the present, and we can use the powerful tools of communication we wear on our faces and carry in our pockets to communicate with people we care about in real time. I think that it is important to celebrate the work of the living. They (and we, as long as I am here) are trying to make the present matter.

Tipping Point (Cyber and Otherwise)

On the bottom of my blogger screen is a little tab that reads "Complaints," so I'm using this moment to register some of my complaints about what seems to have turned into a life as a targeted consumer.

I usually look at my email first thing in the morning. I used to engage in lengthy correspondence with friends from near and far, but now my email experience consists of deleting sale notices from stores where I happen to have shopped once and notices about musical events far removed from my realm of interest and my location. Sometimes I find a message from a friend, colleague, or family member, and once in a while I get a notice about a comment to this blog, but it is always the exception. There are sometimes work-related email messages, which I always welcome. I have actually come to cherish those.

I delete between eight and ten messages before breakfast. By lunch time there are usually eight more. I always try to "clean house" in my inbox before I go to bed.

If I look at Facebook these days, I am bombarded by "posts" from people who have paid to have their "posts" reach me, along with ads from places where I might have shopped on line. I bought some socks on line last week, and ads enticing me to buy more socks popped up everywhere (and not just on Facebook). Facebook seems to have become the de-facto vehicle for personal communication, and I hate the fact that I have had to use it as such in family matters. "It" is kind of making "itself" indispensable (and in some ways it is making me feel dispensable). I have decided, for the sake of my health, to limit my Facebook time to 17 minutes per day.

[We used to have a "17 minute rule" back when all four members of the family lived under one roof and shared a single desktop computer.]

Today's US mail brought two letters. One was an official looking one from Washington, DC marked "Finance Department." It was, of course, a plea for money from a political organization. The other had a hand-written address (which, upon further study, I realized was just a very well-designed handwriting font). Then there was a card from a business that sends us catalogs, and a New Yorker magazine.

Somehow, around the time when the ads in my email inbox started increasing, the annoying robo telephone calls started decreasing. If the phone rings now (and it does rarely) it is usually from someone in the family, or an automated reminder from our HMO to get a flu shot (which just happened--while I was writing this very paragraph).

I have to say that thanks to technology I have NEVER felt so emotionally disconnected from the outside world, which appears from this end to be an endless stream of people trying to sell me stuff.

My patience is exhausted.

Thank goodness for music. End of rant. Time to practice and (thankfully) teach a few lessons later this afternoon.

Sidebar Lives: A Rant

Sometime during the first decade of the 21st century a friend referred to her life outside of our town and her work as college professor as her "sidebar life." Now that the concept of the "sidebar" has pretty much withered away from the usual on-line experience (blogs and websites still have sidebars, but fewer and fewer people seem to pay attention to them).

Many people, including me at times, have double lives. We have the life that involves the people we interact with in person, whether at work, play, or at home. Then we have our virtual communities, which sometimes involve commerce. Then we have our communities of social media friends, who are not necessarily people we spend time talking with, even though we might live in the same town or occupy the same work space.

We seem to be bound to our various cultures by our devices, and our virtual cultures (or cultures of "stuff") have become so rarified that it seems there is very little in the way of actual (if I can even use the word "actual" to refer to something different from "virtual" at this point) culture that serves as a point of reference.

There are only a few elements of culture that seem to affect all the people in proximity to me, but except for the weather, which is always a surprise these days, they are hard to find.

There seems to be one thing that unifies everyone under the age of 40 and most people under the age of 80: cell phones. Cell phones (and computers, tablet and otherwise) seem to be the entry point for just about everything concerning culture.

At rehearsal breaks it seems that everybody under the age of 40 communes with their virtual world by way of a cell phone. There are sometimes people I would love to speak with, but I feel like I'm interrupting something when I invade someone's cellular space. The cell phone seems, in many ways, to push away possibly activity in the non virtual world. In some ways, partly due to social media (i.e. Facebook), we know too much about one another, so actual real-time personal talk can seem superfluous.

My college students no longer seem to recognize cultural references. Television used to be something that provided a great deal of cultural common ground, but that is no longer the case. I suppose that people who watch the same shows have a kind of community, but that community is more virtual than real. I even notice an ambivalence to cultural references. Perhaps my students are lost in a digital polyculture, and they don't have the ability to recognize landmarks on a "map." Then again, there is no map.

A few years ago I played Copland's "Hoedown" from Rodeo for a class. The students all seemed to be engaged, and one student even responded by enthusiastically saying, "Pork, the other white meat" because he recognized the music from a television commercial. I responded, "Beef, it's what's for dinner." Everyone laughed, and a good time was had by all.

Today I played Bonaparte's Retreat, and followed it by "Hoedown." Sure. The cultural context I gave them was the correct one, but I found it sad that nobody recognized it from a television commercial that was popular during their childhood. It is pathetic, in a way, that I am grasping at television commercials for cultural context. It's a new cultural low for me. Nobody recognized "Rhapsody in Blue" from its use in commercials either.

I used to feel that there was a divide between popular culture and non-popular culture (the cultural stuff that made "culture" an operative term). Now I just don't know. I stopped trying to keep up back in the 1990s. I don't know how anyone can keep up now. How are we supposed to teach our students to recognize something of value in this cultural quagmire? Maybe they can recognize value when it is explained to them during actual class time, but how can we expect students to remember how to recognize something of value when they don't even have the skills (or the desire) to read the virtual map?

Establishing Musical Authority: A Rant

It seems that the very first thing we learn about teachers is that they have authority over students. As children we have all experienced the powerlessness connected with being "judged" by our teachers.

Obedience from students is highly valued in a classroom music situation because it gives the instructor the illusion that the students understand the musical directions and are eager to act upon them. Students learn early on (and sometimes against their better judgement) that the conductor or leader of a group is the one making the music, and that it is the role of a good "team player" to go with the flow and follow directions. What I have noticed from my perch on the other side of childhood, is that the end product of this kind of teacher-student relationship can result, if it is is not immediately addressed, in musical passivity and lack of musical awareness on the part of students. It also results in people who develop the desire to become school band and chorus directors for the perceived power connected with such a position.

I was very lucky as a child. I had formal music teachers who taught their students to listen to one another. I had formal music teachers who were in the business of teaching music because they loved the true expression that results when young people love what they were doing, whether it be singing or playing. I don't recall any of my elementary chorus teachers or orchestra teachers having to establish authority, because everyone participating in their ensembles (which were all after school ensembles) were there to make music. The vocal ensembles I sang with throughout my time in Junior High and in High School (in Newton, Massachusetts) were exceptional. What did the kids in them do for fun? We got together for parties and sang the music we knew. There was no "director" when we did this. We followed the piano (and there was usually a kid who could play the piano accompaniments). I admired and respected my musical colleagues, and I loved making music with them.

Perhaps this early indoctrination into cooperative music making has caused me to value the cooperative musical experience: the idea that participating in a chamber music ensemble means that every person has the obligation to contribute to the interpretation, and nobody is the "authority." Even as a composer I do not feel the need to be the "authority" in a musical situation.

Why is it that young musicians tend to have difficulty with this? Why must a small performing group have a leader? Could it be the practices of the musical hierarchies at higher academic institutions? Could it be the importance given to the "lesson plan," something people learn in music education classes? Could it be that the "authority" role is given to the composer, who, often being dead has to have his or her "authority" interpreted by a single human being armed, at times, with a set of rules?

When I play in an orchestra I do follow the conductor and I follow the bowings of the section leader. I feel that in an orchestra (made of many playing the same part) the best contribution I can make is to play the notes, rhythms, articulations, and dynamics in my music, blend with my stand partner, and give energy to the sound of the section as a whole. But the difference between section playing and chamber music, where everyone plays his or her own part, is that everyone is responsible for keeping the tempo, everyone is responsible for playing together, and everyone is responsible for the interpretation. I have found that music making improves exponentially when everyone has a stake in the interpretation, and the experience is often less than satisfying when there is one leader among the people playing or singing who takes "ownership" of the situation.

Perhaps it is difficult to teach cooperative chamber music playing in a university situation. Chamber music ensembles in university settings often have coaches, and students usually rely on those coaches (who usually do know a lot if they are coaching chamber music in a university situation) to tell them what to do. A coach who comes to a rehearsal and tells the ensemble that they need to work their interpretation out amongst themselves might not be the kind of coach that would produce the best results. When coaching it is really difficult not to make suggestions (especially when those suggestions might really improve things). Left to their own devices, and without the presence of an authority figure, some students might not take a musical situation seriously (i.e. learn his or her part, remain focused on the task at hand, or even show up for rehearsal). When everyone is at the same "rank" in an essentially hierarchical situation, students may not respect one another enough to work on their own.

Perhaps it has something to do with my experiences, but I do not like being in the position of a musician who is expected to dictate "how" something should go. As a composer I try to put everything that is necessary for my part of the interpretation into the music, but I don't expect a group to replicate the ideas I have in my head. I expect to hear new ideas, and I expect to hear things I never noticed before. I like to voice suggestions and observations, and I like it when people take my ideas seriously, but the idea of "authority" in a musical situation is abhorrent to me because there is no "authority." Music making often involves making instance-by-instance decisions, and change and inspiration (that often come only through intuition) are the very things that make experiences with music truly meaningful.

Natural Selection in Music

This is an edited (and expanded) version of a comment I put on Mixed Meters today. It's another post-mortem about classical music. I'm not sure why I feel the need to respond to these claims (which have been made ad-nauseum elsewhere), but it's a Sunday morning, and I have the rest of the day to occupy myself with feeding the hungry musical beast (i.e. practicing and writing).

There used to be a self-selection method to keep music contemporary. Most of it wasn't written down during the Middle Ages. The stuff that was published during the Renaissance was written in notation that changed, so it became virtually useless until the 20th century when people figured out how to read it and decided to make modern editions. Monarchs held onto their libraries during what we call the Baroque period (which made a lot of music inaccessible--like music by Vivaldi), and after the keepers of the libraries died pages would get moldy, would get destroyed by fire, or would be used to wrap fish.

A few astute people kept the good stuff safe and in good condition, and made sure that it made its way into the hands and ears of the best later 18th-century composers, even though it had gone completely out of fashion. (I'm talking about Bach, Handel, Baron von Swieten, Mozart, and Haydn here.)

Most of the early 19th century was devoid of Baroque elements, but when Schumann et al went and published Bach's music (for the first time), it had a resurgence among musicians. Audiences (non musicians) didn't get their "Renaissance" until the 20th century, when people started making recordings.

The preservation and study of old music became a whole field of music (that would be musicology), and we now have more music from the past at our fingertips than any intelligent musician could dream of having. And more is coming.

The past is vast, but the present is now. The audience for music (any and all music including "classical music") has a far greater proportion of people who do not have a functional grasp of the materials of music or the proximity to performances to experience it without using some form of electrical energy to get it to reach their ears. We now have music critics who don't have practical experience as practicing, composing, or performing musicians, and, like me we have people writing about music without a "gatekeeper" to decide if what we say has validity.

I don't believe it's worth the time I could be spending learning new (to me) Renaissance, Baroque music, or new 19th and 20th-century music, practicing my instruments, writing music, or writing blog posts, to dwell on whether the music I care about is living or dying.

I'm long past hoping that more than a healthy handful of people will share my views on anything, and I'm grateful that these people still read blogs.

Reconsidering Perfection

Arnold Schoenberg in 1936:

…although the premier of this quartet was exceptionally well presented by Master Rosé and his wonderful string quartet, one knows that perfection cannot be expected at the very first performance. So it was this second string quartet about which a gentleman once asked me whether I had got it already in a perfect manner.
I had to answer, “Yes, during the composing.” Now, since the Kolish Quartet exists, and thanks to my friend Alfred Newman, who gave me the opportunity to record these compositions, everybody, and even myself are in the position to hear it in a perfect manner, in a perfect performance.

Arnold Schoenberg recorded this comment as part of a 1937 recording of his complete string quartets. This set of recordings, along with several other pieces, has recently been reissued on the Music & Arts label in a set called “In Honor of Rudolf Kolish.”

This comment bothered me a great deal when I first heard it, and it continues to bother me. It bothers me because I believe that the word “perfection” is terribly restrictive, and that striving for it can get in the way of having satisfying musical experiences.

I would like to believe that Schoenberg would agree with me and react to his recorded statement as something that he simply said at the time, under the pressure of having to sound authoritative. Schoenberg, like the rest of us, was not perfect.

I have heard thousands of performances played by people who memorized every single note, dynamic marking, and articulation marking of a piece. Some of these people replicated the score exactly, but lacked the “room” to make a personal statement or allow a sense of joy to come into the music making.

Performing musicians so often imagine that the composer of the piece they are playing is an authoritarian Schoenberg-like figure that requires those who play his or her music to act only as the composer's “voice.” It is a shame that people think of music in that way, because most of the composers I know get very excited about hearing their music interpreted by other people who can illuminate it with humanity, experience, and perspective.

The relationship between the interpreter and the composer, whether the composer is alive or dead, should be a highly creative one, but any kind of creative relationship allows for lapses in what might be an objective sense of “perfection.”

In order to allow for more fulfilling musical experiences I have decided to limit my use of the word “perfection” to non artistic matters. I would also like to eradicate the terms perfect intonation, perfect rhythm, perfect technique, and perfect performance from my vocabulary.

Perfect intonation simply doesn’t exist. Even though people like Schoenberg tried to do away with the importance of tonality during the first part of the 20th century, most of the music we play, whether old or new, is grounded in some kind of tonality. Working within the tonal system, by its very nature, requires constant adjustment. When playing chamber music or solo music with a pianist, the temperament of the piano becomes the force by which we measure where to place our notes so that they sound in tune. When playing chamber music without a piano we must also adjust our intonation constantly, especially when the music we play modulates or where the distances between notes played by one or more of the players exceed the span of an octave. Because of the limitations created by its frets, playing with a guitar requires an even greater set of adjustments.

When playing chamber music with wind players, each musician must adjust to the natural places where notes fall on particular instruments and in particular registers. When playing wind music with non tertian harmonies, all the rules of “just intonation” regarding the relative position of thirds are useless.

One of the technological advances used in working on intonation is the electronic tuning device. Relying on this “authority” for where a pitch should “be” as determined by mathematical calculations is useful in only the most rudimentary musical situations (like establishing an initial “A” at the beginning of a rehearsal). During a chromatic modulation, a sensitive ear (or two) is far more useful as a guide than an electronic pitch that does not understand what is happening to the notes around it. Intonation is best worked out on a note-by-note and interval-by-interval basis, and it should be discussed among players in a friendly and “relative” manner. When we become angry or insecure about what we hear, we become tense, and it becomes difficult to listen properly. Intervals that are in tune resonate, and it is this resonance that makes music sound beautiful. Perhaps a more attainable goal for intonation would be to work for uniformity, beauty, balance, and resonance rather than “perfection.”

Perfect rhythm is also a term that bothers me. Accurate rhythm is what happens when music swings along at a natural and even pace, with subdivisions that happen to enhance the flow of the music. In all the music we play notes are either going somewhere, coming from somewhere, or staying somewhere for a while. In most of the music we play the notes are doing all three things at the same time. Although it is useful to practice with a metronome in order for our bodies to feel the even flow of the music, we need to internalize this rhythmic sense by feeling the rhythm rather than “beating” it. Perhaps a goal for a more satisfying sense of rhythmic motion in music would be to strive for a natural, internal, and organic rhythmic swing rather than for “perfection.”

The struggle for “perfect technique” very often cancels itself out by creating a technique that contains a great deal of tension. There is really no such thing as a single “perfect technique” for any instrument. We all have different body types and play instruments that require various fine adjustments in order to get them to produce the sounds we want them to produce. Perhaps we should strive to build our technique with the goals of strength, flexibility, comfort, and structure.

Once we remove the struggle for perfection from the various pre-requisites of performing (intonation, rhythm, technique) it seems out of context to imagine a “perfect performance.” In our search for resonance and beautiful intonation, natural rhythmic flow, with notes moving naturally, and a relaxed and flexible technique, all sorts of unexpected expressive surprises might happen in a performance that no musician could plan, explain, or even fully understand. That is the mystery and the beauty of music.