Echolocation and Music in its Natural State

I just learned that echolocation can be developed in humans (i.e. people) to such a great extent that blind people can learn to "see" objects from the way that they reflect sound.

Here's an article that describes the matter in scientific detail, and here's an interview with Brian Bushway that describes how it works for him.

After listening to the Bushway interview on my walk today (through an electronic device, of course), I went out into the natural world of my back yard to pull some weeds (my latest way of being useful). I noticed that once you remove the headphones, hearing sound in the real world is truly multidimensional. It is possible to hear how far one bird is from another (generally speaking), and to hear how directionally we really are able to hear. (You can't hear weeds though: separating them from the grass takes a sharp eye and a ruthless spirit.)

I began to understand why the fact that most people experience music only through electronically-generated media bothers me so much. Very expensive recording equipment that is operated by very experienced engineers can come close to simulating the experience of a multidimensional world of surround sound, but the difference between close and real is huge when it involves listening with your whole being. Also, the difference between close and real can involve some serious manipulations on the part of the engineer that render the sonic "image" in ways that "improve" the sound of the original raw material. It's kind of like what you can do in the darkroom of you are adept at photography, or kind of what you can do with photoshop if you are adept at using computers.

Too many performance venues (new concert halls and churches in particular) are constructed with the idea of projecting amplified sound, which is, after all, simulated sound. I have played in some of these halls. The sound that bounces off the walls (if there is anything reflecting the sound at all) tends to be brittle and unfriendly. I have played in churches are "wired" so that all the amplified sound goes through a board that is manipulated and balanced by a board operator. I much prefer the experience of walls (particular old ones made of plaster), and balances that are manipulated by the people playing the music.

Of course I listen to recordings, and I have learned to love a lot of the music I hear on them. I also really appreciate being able to hear things I otherwise wouldn't be able to hear (because the people playing are no longer living, among other obvious reasons). But I do not believe that a musician develops the ability to hear him or herself play (and therefore improve) without developing the ability to listen in 360 natural surround sound. You can hear what is wrong when you use a recording device to play something back, but figuring out how to make the music have real meaning in the larger world of sound bouncing off stuff has to be developed by bouncing your sound off stuff (and stuff, of course, includes the sounds of other musicians playing in the same physical and acoustic space).

My concluding thought? Musicians need to play with one another in order to get better at what they do. They also need to play for people (as in audiences) in order to understand that what they do has meaning that goes beyond their own enjoyment. Eliminating or reducing either of these is a recipe for serious musical decline.

Being Useful

I have always thought of what I do (and have done) in music as being something useful. But I notice, as the world around me changes, many of the ways I thought I was being useful are, frankly, not of much use to as many people as they used to be. People used to ask me to write music for them all the time. It still happens, but now it happens only rarely.

I find it very difficult to write something when I know that it will never actually be played. That's why I stopped writing operas. I certainly have operatic ideas, but it is too daunting a task to put the time and effort required to write an opera if there is no chance that it will ever get produced. From experience (and from a lot of time, effort, photocopying, and postage trying to get performances), I know that I am right. I would love to be pleasantly surprised (who wouldn't), but I'm tired of trying to keep my hopes up. What I have done in that medium may just as well not have been done. It's of no use to anyone.

Nothing kills inspiration like apathy.

I try to be useful in my community. I try to give my students as much as I can give them (though the numbers are seriously down these days), and I try my best to contribute something to the ever-dwindling musical life in this town with an ever-dwindling number of people who care about what I do. It used to be much easier.

So, since I have to work, I have been busying myself with what I consider the musical equivalent of knitting. I usually spend the spring making new arrangements (of music written by other people) for our Summer Strings orchestra, but this year, for want of other projects, I started last month. I have been going great guns making arrangements that I hope will amuse the people who will be playing them next summer (most of them are not my students). My hope is that they will help those people find a sense of usefulness and purpose as growing musicians.

I know that on the other side of this window (that I am typing in right now) there is a larger world where there are people who use my arrangements to amuse and inspire their students (a few people send me videos, which I enjoy a great deal). I hope that some of those people can find some use for the original music I have written over the years. Occasionally bits of it pop up when I put my iPod on shuffle, and I realize that there is some music of quality in the body of work I have written. It is very easy for me to forget what I have done and what I am capable of doing, when the kind of support that I need (and that all creative people need) is lacking.

My Thematic Catalog blog is kind of stuffed with arrangements right now. People regularly go to it looking for what I think is a pretty good arrangement for string orchestra of the Pachelbel Canon, but I do have a little bit of hope that somebody might look for some of the original music I have written. Perhaps there might be something there that somebody can use.

Related Post for people who work with string players and need music.

Charles Mills

Last night Michael and I watched Lionel Rogosin's 1956 film On the Bowery. Here's the trailer.



The music for the trailer is but a snippet from Charles Mills' score. The oboist Harold Gomberg is listed as the conductor, but since there are never more than three people playing (oboe, clarinet, and cello, a few measures of flute, and a bit of prepared piano), he must be listed that way for reasons that have to do with the conventions of film making. The vibrato-laden flute sound that comes in somewhere towards the end of the movie must come from John Wummer, the cellist and the clarinetist are both excellent. Perhaps someone reading this might recognize one or the other by his (or her--though not so likely in 1956) sound.

Anyway, this is the first I have heard of Charles Mills (1914-1982). The music for this film is not listed in his list of works on his American Composer's Alliance page, and the bit used in the trailer is only a little taste.

I like this photo, partly because of the alto and tenor recorders he has on his desk, and because it looks like he might be transcribing Renaissance music from part books.

It's not easy to find out much about this particular Charles Mills. He's not one of the people in the Charles Mills entry in Wikipedia. The composer there, Charles Henry Mills, directed the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, and had a music library named for him. This is a different (and younger) Charles Mills. A search in Google Books points to a book written by Elinor Rogosin, who was married to the film maker. She mentions Mills (in only one paragraph) as an occasional dinner companion and the composer of the score for On the Bowery. My guess is that Mills must have been a friend of Harold Gomberg. There's a Mills Concertino for Oboe and Strings from 1957 (one year after On the Bowery came out) that Mills might have written for Gomberg. Who knows?

Does anybody know?

Here's what I have found out: Mills studied with Copland and Sessions, and taught at the Manhattan School of Music. Most of his chamber music (a lot of it from the 1950s) seems to have been published by the American Composers Alliance. Some is available from various libraries by way of the World Cat.

Here's a 12-minute film about Greenwich Village in the 1960s where you can hear more Mills music, and you can hear him play recorder (OK, it's not the most in-tune recorder playing, but the film is a great peek into the past).

Thought for the Day

Playing (and writing) music is a lousy way to try to make a living, but a terrific way to make a life.

Oh, Oh, Oh, Okra!

Michael and I joined a farm cooperative this summer, and one of the constant products we found in our weekly box was a bag of okra (even during the dog weeks when the temperature was constantly in the 100s). I have always avoided okra because I found it slimy (and it is). I ate it "ingrediently" in gumbo, of course, where I only thought of it as a thickener. It didn't, as far as I was concerned, have any merits on its own. I dutifully (and carefully, because of the slime) cut up our weekly stash, and threw it in the freezer for winter gumbo.

The other day I decided to bite the bullet (or the pod), and try it on its own. I sauteed it in olive oil with some garlic and a bit of salt, and found it delicious. The picture above is some okra I roasted with garlic and tofu, and ate with some kamut (wheat berries). Again, it was delicious.

I sure hope that the box of vegetables we get today includes some okra.

It is also some kind of super super food. Here's some of the stuff it can (ostensibly) do for you (you can find the whole list here).

It protects against trans fats, stabilizes blood sugar, gets rid of cholesterol, prevents constipation, feeds good bacteria, helps fight depression, heals ulcers, lubricates joints, treats lung inflammation, sore throat, and irritable bowel syndrome, helps with asthma, helps support the structure of capillaries, lowers the risk of cataracts, helps prevent diabetes, and is good for your skin.

The Worst Exploitation of Innocent Musicians I Have Seen To Date

Make sure to read the comments on this post, so you can truly understand the kind of outrage this woman in generating among musicians. I sincerely hope that either no musicians show up at her concerts (where she is offering them a opportunity to play back-up for her for free), nobody shows up to witness the concerts, and the people who donated the million dollars to Kickstarter sue to get their money back.

A Late Quartet

Look! A mainstream movie (with big actors) called A Late Quartet premiered last night in Toronto. Playing second violin we see Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken is the cellist, Catherine Keener (with her hand in what looks like second position) is the violist, and the first violinist is Mark Ivanir. Here's the trailer.



It looks like these actors spent enough time learning how to hold their instruments and bows to make plausible playing motions (at least left-hand-wise, and in first position, playing open strings). The bow arms are not so great, but I don't think that they would offend the general non-string-player audience member. But the movie is indeed enticing, the instruments are lovely, and you can't beat the soundtrack (the Brentano String Quartet is doing the actual playing).

I wonder if it will ever make it to a theater near me!

Here's one review, and here's another.

Here is the IMDB listing of the whole cast and crew.

Nobody's Fool: Henryk Szeryng plays a fantastic La Folia

This brightened my day, so I thought I'd share it here!

A Violist's Guide to Electoral Politics

I feel the need to write these fresh-from-the-shower thoughts (that have nothing to do with musical politics, a field that I find perplexing, subjective, and complicated) and share them. I should let you know that all I know about business is what I learned from a year of word processing at Bain and Company back in the 1980s.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, so the big money that corporate donors are giving to the current Republican campaigns (and they are broadcasting their donations far and wide) really can only be thought of as investments. These are shrewd business people who got to their positions by selling stuff to people and then selling shares in their companies to people who want to profit from the fact that they are selling more of the stuff than other companies. They also got their wealth by having their stuff made in the cheapest way possible, so they have it all made in places where people will work long hours for very low wages and will work in conditions that may be unsafe or unhealthy. The laws of the lands where the workers that make this stuff live dictate the working conditions and the wages, and the companies that own the factories profit from the advantages of having an eager and competent bunch of people who seem to be happy to do piecework at an hourly rate that amounts to pocket change for most Americans.

These heavy-hitting corporate donors promote candidates who will weaken (or destroy) unions and candidates who will reduce (or remove) government regulations. They will do their best to keep the corporate executives who make gobs of money from having to pay taxes at a rate appropriate for their income level. The Representatives that made it to congress in 2010 made sure to block any job creation bills that happened to come through the house in order to keep the jobless rate a level they could criticize in the 2012 election. Those people promise more jobs if they are elected, but the won't tell anyone exactly how. Or what jobs (outside of the oil industry). Or where. Or even when.

Here's what I think. If Romney were to get elected, and if he proves trustworthy to his supporters (not the ideological ones, the corporate ones), those companies will build new factories in America (using American labor). They will "create" part-time jobs (for which they plan not to provide the health benefits to their employees required in the Affordable Care Act that they will insist Romney repeal, even if by executive order), pay wages as low as they can get away with, and then claim (honestly for once) that America is "getting back to work again." They would make sure that the path toward unionization would be blocked, kind of like the way Walmart does it (a good model for this kind of thing). Those workers, even the ones with low-paying jobs, would still pay taxes. There would be a lot of them, so they would shoulder the burdens of running the government. There would, of course, be managerial jobs here and there, and those people would probably be paid well to keep the costs of running the factories down and keeping production up using whatever means possible.

There would certainly be a bunch of high-paying jobs, particularly in the fields where people make stuff for warfare. Romney declared that he would strengthen the military. I'm curious about what he really means by a strengthening military beyond increasing contracts for the people at Halliburton (who also make stuff for digging for oil). I kind of thought our military has been running very well. Romney must mean putting money into stuff, and then waging war so that we have an excuse to use it, or trot it out to show how powerful we are.

Where does it leave people like me and my family (made of musicians and teachers)? I am afraid to think about it. We all try to instill a love of learning, literature, music, curiosity, and community responsibility into our students. Another generation blighted by the problems we saw during the Bush administration (those are the students Michael and I teach), with the added problems of increased gender inequality, religious intolerance, racial intolerance, homophobia, and lack of adequate health care (with all its implications) scares me.

I want the children our kids teach (all who have come of school age during the Obama administration) to have the kind of future they have been promised: that you can accomplish anything if you work hard and play by the rules. I want to be able to teach those students when they get to college, and I want those students to be the leaders of the future. Maybe the Republicans want most of those people to be the workers of the future rather than the scholars, scientists, historians, and philosophers (and musicians, artists, and writers) that would give us a more civilized world.

Ann Romney: "I Won't Talk, Don't Ask Me"

I couldn't resist messing with this old Fred and Ginger chestnut after reading this bit of news.

"Here in Iowa, as you know, same-sex marriage is legal. Do you believe a lesbian mother should be allowed to marry her partner?" David Nelson, a KWQC anchor asked. "You know, I'm not going to talk about the specific issues," Romney responded, adding that "hot-button issues" distract from the economy.

Here's my take on it: DAVID NELSON: Think of what you're losing 
 By constantly refusing
 To talk to me.
 You'd be the idol of the airwaves with me. And yet you stand there and shake your foolish head rheumatically 
While I wait here so ecstatically.
 You just look and say emphatically: ANN ROMNEY: Not this season. There's a reason. I won't talk. Don't ask me.
 I won't talk. Don't ask me.
 I won't talk, about these issues with you.
 My Mitt won't let my mouth do things it should do. My apologies to Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Jimmy McHugh, who wrote the original (and immortal) lyric, and to Jerome Kern, who wrote the music that is now in your head. Feel free to add to this little bit of madness. Who can resist?

The Stationery Stores of Alexander King's Viennese Childhood

[This passage will be particularly resonant for Sean and for Michael.]

I cannot resist telling you something about those stationery stores of my Viennese childhood. Plastics had not yet been invented, so everything in those magical shops was real. Wood was wood, paper was paper, and all the toys were made out of real substances and painted by hand. When I think back on my early visits to these places I often fall into reveries so profound that they practically amount to protracted nostalgic seizures. I remember all the blond, the brunette, and the dark pencils, neatly stacked in their boxes, from which emanated the decent reassuring odors of cedarwood, and I tell you that even the smell of the real organic glue that held all those clean, virginal pads and books so firmly together used to give my young heart such a thrill of expectancy, such a feeling of unutterable joy, that the mere recollection of it all is like a benign immersion in a health-giving stream.

Alexander King, Is There Life After Birth? (1963) page 22.

(Terre) Haute Cuisine

Around 20 years ago I met a man named Jeff in Morton Park in Charleston. I was there with the very young Rachel and Ben, and he was there with his daughter Delaney. We both had spouses who taught in the same English department, so we had a lot to talk about. He told me that he moved to Terre Haute, Indiana (a town an hour away from our town) from Chicago and had recently opened a Kosher Deli (!) called Rosenberg's (named for Julius and Ethel in the town where Eugene V. Debs and Theodore Dreiser were born). We made the trip to Terre Haute often, visiting the Children's Museum, and eating fantastic deli food at Rosenberg's. We rarely made the trip to Terre Haute after the deli closed several years ago.

A friend sent me a link about a restaurant called Harry and Bud's European Cuisine in Terre Haute, and as soon as I realized that it was run by Jeff (of Rosenberg's fame), we made immediate plans to go there. Plans involved calling to inquire if they had any vegan food (yup, we can do that), and making reservations.

We went there yesterday. We were the only people in the restaurant. He made an extraordinary meal just for us.

The restaurant is as close as I have seen in America to a French country inn (with a prix fixe menu--$25.00 per person for lunch), and the decor is highly eclectic, but very comfortable. Jeff brought us plate after plate of rich and tasty vegan food that included clever adaptations of traditionally-prepared French provincial dishes. He uses garlic so liberally that it almost acts like a vegetable, but he balances his spices in such a way that the garlic doesn't "stick out." He mentioned an obscene number of heads of garlic that had given their lives for the sauce he put on the stuffed cabbage (you can see it above). We didn't bring any wine with us (you can bring your own wine), but the meal was thoroughly intoxicating without wine.

He also made some knock-your-socks-off gnocchi, some of the best polenta I have ever eaten, a delicious lentil and red kale salad, and stunningly-delicious French bread. Michael, who eats everything, had lamb (above) seasoned with, among other things, lavender.

What you see above is a portion of our leftovers (and everything tasted great with wine when we had some for dinner this evening). We brought home four containers of food that provided today's lunch and dinner, and will certainly provide at least one meal tomorrow. It was a Thanksgiving's worth of leftovers.

If you happen to be travelling through Indiana on Route 70, give Jeff a call (812-237-0400 and call ahead so he has time to plan). The website has only lunch hours posted, but Jeff will certainly make you (and your friends) dinner as well.

You can read Michael's post about our meal, and you can read what people we don't know have said about the restaurant on Yelp. It's all true.

Edward Ward's The Phantom of the Opera

This is, of course, the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera normally referred to as the "Claude Rains version" (which you can watch on YouTube). You could also call this the Nelson Eddy version or the Susanna Foster version, because they are also featured actors (and terrific singers).

What I loved most about it was the use of lavishly-orchestrated music by Chopin for a faux-opera. It makes a double whammy because the Chopin pieces (his best-known hits) would certainly have been familiar to 1943 audiences, and because it makes a reference to the friendship between Pauline Viardot and Frederick Chopin. Viardot, who was a huge international opera star during the middle part of the 19th century, worked with Chopin on French vocal settings of 12 of his Mazurkas. I believe that Edward Ward, who won an academy award for his Phantom score in 1944, made the best of all musical choices with using Chopin here, because Chopin never wrote any vocal music, and his presence would have been well-felt in Paris during the time the movie was set. (When Martha , translated appropriately into French for this movie, was a brand new hit!). Liszt is also featured in the film, complete with his priest's collar (which is hard to see here).



For the grand finale opera of the film (what a repertoire and what resources this fictional opera company had!), Edward Ward and librettist George Waggner used themes from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, for an opera that they sang, naturally, in Russian.

Some of the music was original: the main theme of the movie, Ward's own "Lullaby of the Bells," bears occasional (and highly appropriate) homage to Camille Saint-Saens.

The only thing that I object to in this movie is its use of a fictionalized version of Ignaz Pleyel as a publisher who refused to even consider publishing the piano concerto (that features the "Lullaby of the Bells" as its main theme) written by the man who would become the phantom. They used Pleyel's name because Pleyel was a well-known Parisian publisher, but they clearly knew little about him.

Luck Favors the Prepared Mind

As luck would have it, while I was listening to a podcast of "The Story" called Hellbender and Vipers, Paul Auerbach let this phrase drop while talking about being able to recognize the physical signs of a person having been struck by lightning. His book, Wilderness Medicine, sounds fascinating.

I committed the phrase to memory (no easy task for me), mused upon it, and found out, after I returned home and consulted the oracle (the internet), that it is actually a common English translation of a statement made in 1854 by Louis Pasteur, "Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés." In other words (and I mean that literally), that use of the word "luck" seems to be a comment on an entirely different matter.

What we call "luck" happens, I guess, because most of us interact with our environments, both in our day-to-day walking lives and through media. I can read a little French, so I am able to understand that Pasteur was talking about things that are possible to miss if you are not aware of the possibilities that may be right in front of your eyes. I would not say that it's lucky I took French in high school (something that did make it possible for me to read Pasteur's statement in his own words), but I would say that it is fortunate that I have been able to remember some the French that I did happen to learn. I would not say that it's lucky that I happened to be listening to that particular podcast, thus making it possible for me to write this blog post (what would Pasteur, I wonder, make of this sentence?), but I would say that it is fortunate that I noticed one particular phrase, and was able to amuse myself (and you) by thinking about it.

So what does this have to do with music? Practically it means that if I practice and remain in good playing shape, I will be able to make the most of any musical situation. Intellectually it means that I am able to recognize the way standard techniques are used by really great composers, and can compare the use of those techniques in the works of composers who were (or are) not as great. I can learn from the examples of excellence that we have in our vast musical repertoire, and begin to understand why some composers are/were more successful than other composers (independent of achieving fame or money). If, while writing a piece of music, I happen to write a note I didn't intend to write, and it ends up changing the whole direction or feeling of a phrase, I guess I would call that a case of luck favoring a mind prepared to explore all options.

If I come across a new piece of music that I love, I do consider it a bit of luck. A person without my particular set of musical experiences might not be able to recognize its exceptional qualities (I have also noticed that there are people who really don't care about stuff that interests me). There are also a whole lot of musical experiences embedded (or sometimes hidden) in pieces of music that I know really well. It is important to always keep our ears and eyes wide open, and ready for the next musical experience to reveal itself. Perhaps my version of Pasteur's statement would be that music favors the prepared mind.

Predicting the Future of Recorded Music

Physical sales will still be around for a while, maybe for another 20 or 25 years — until the people who are now in their 50s reach their 70s. There are kids out there, 20 to 25 years old, who have never bought a CD. We will release fewer and fewer recordings physically as time goes by, and more and more just digitally.

Klaus Heymann's prediction spells a certain doom to me. The problem is that he is not simply a person with insight, or a person who can spot trends. He is now the leader of the pack, and the person in the driver's seat (and he has been for the last quarter of a century). He is giving us his 25-year plan which I am certain will become everybody's 25-year plan.

Read this article and see what you think.