So, I've been listening to several different lecture series on the history of Western Classical Music, and this view of the grand sweep of music and culture since about 1100 to about 1916 has given me some ideas about my own place in music history.
I. Collaboration vs Auteur
First, I can play a part in returning music to a state it hasn't been in since Medieval times. A recent lecture I listened to from a series about Opera made a contrast between the earliest Gregorian chants, which were monophonic (had one melody line), that pretty much followed the words, and early polyphony, in which more than one line was sung at once. With this fact, that more than one note would be sung at the some time, came the obligation for someone to make choices about which notes those would be, and a requirement for the skill to know which notes would be better than others. It required a composer, and with that we had a distinction between the composer, the performers, and the audience, whose role was to sit and listen.
The lecturer pointed out that we still live in that world today, which we certainly do, but I have noticed in my own life more and more opportunities for communal music-making. Community groups like Gamelan Sekar Gemuda bring people of all different ages and musical abilities together to play in an ensemble - ensemble is totally the most important thing about Gamelan, and through playing together we are bonded into a community. Community education events at the Mile of Music Festival often provide opportunities for music-making to anyone. The education leaders lead people in rhythm exercises, group sings, drumming circles, and again, Gamelan. Anyone can do it, and it's an occasion for everyone to do it together. And my monthly jam sessions are designed to give adult musicians a chance to play together, regardless of expertise or level. They have ended up being jam sessions for beginner women, but that's fine. It's a chance for all of us to make music together. And then church, of course, is a time when the whole congregation sings together, and Episcopalians are known for always singing in four parts.
So I'm doing my part to restore the communal, participative nature of music, which is a move away from the expert-audience divide that has dominated since those polyphonic chants.
II. Craft to glorify God vs Ego
I listened to a whole set of lectures on JS Bach, and a whole other set on WA Mozart. Both of them were working before the Romantic period. By the time you got to post-Beethoven, the point of composing was individual expression by the composer. The compositions were supposed to be about the composer's inner life, either his (usually his) thoughts and dreams, or his emotions, or his memories. This shift led to a cult of personality, in which composers were treated like rock stars in their own time period, and then the attendant bad behavior - overindulgence, manipulation of groupies of the opposite sex, extravagent lifestyles, etc. But Bach and Mozart were working back when composing was a craft. You got hired by either the church or the local government, and you were expected to provide music for all the occasions those institutions demanded. Plus direct the choir, plus teach the children and direct their choir, plus provide piece to honor royalty, and whatever else your bosses decided to call upon you to do. The lecturer played two fragments of pieces written by Mozart on the week that his father died. The first one, yes, sounded dark. Did it truly reflect Mozart's grief and anguish, which he never expressly reflected in his letters to anyone? But then the lecturer played another piece, composed that same week, which was light and buoyant and not dark at all. Neither piece can be concluded to express the inner emotional state of the composer, because that's not what music was for back at that time. Composing was a craft, at which both Bach and Mozart were very good and accomplished, and they did it because they were paid to do it, and they did it well to glorify God.
Everything always turns out better if you do it out of generosity rather than out of Ego. Viewing composition as a craft, and a gift to be used to illuminate to others the wonder of creation, that point of view takes a lot of pressure off. Composition isn't being done to prove what a big deal you are. You are just one of millions of composers, and your songs are just part of the uncountable multitude of songs. You are like one of the composers of the many, many Gregorian chants that survive. You can't listen to one and pick out the composer's particular style, because it wasn't about expressing a particular style. All those hundreds of composers were working within a single genre, to follow those musical rules and create something that could be sung as part of a formal ritual, inside a church. Many times per week.
We have lived in the age of the musical Ego ourselves. Think of the rock stars of the 1960's. But that era is done now. The fragmentation of the music industry that everyone bemoans has prevented the possibility of a star of that 1960's magnitude. No one artist can have such universal cultural domination. The means of consumption have fragmented - with iPods, streaming, YouTube, random discoveries on Bandcamp. We are not all listening to the same thing any more, which leads to very specialized niches and subcultures.
More importantly, the means of production are fragmented and have been democratized. Any person can cut a multi-track album, at home. Mix it on their computer, load it up online, boom, you are in the music business. You are a recorded artist. Anyone can do it. There are no gatekeepers - record company A&R men (usually men), radio programmers, concert promoters. The star system is gone. Which means pursuing music for Ego reasons is going to be unsuccessful anyway. So you might as well take the more Renaissance approach. Compose and play and record your songs as a craft. Compose and play and record as many of them as you can! It doesn't matter if the marketplace is crowded - in fact, it's supposed to be. Your obligation is to make a sound in your own voice. You need to be you, as fully as possible, and so does everyone else, and there is plenty of room for all of this. This stance takes away the competition, and the rank ordering. Who cares if I'll never be as good a guitar player as Stevie Ray Vaughn? Or even Joan Jett? That's not what the project is here. My project is to make the music that I would make. These sounds that are inside me (because of who I am and when I grew up and who I loved and who knows what else?), my job is to get them out, just to do it, not to get rich or famous or be better than anyone else.
We are already living in this world. The Ego era is over now, and we can go back to being craftspersons of glory.
III. Spirit -> Mind -> Body
Those Medieval chants have a pure, clear tone, and a peace about them, because they are meant to sound angelic, they are messages to Heaven, and they were written to form a part of formal worship practices.
In the transition to the Enlightenment, the same transition that made composition about the composer, there was also a transition from spirit to mind. There was a belief in Reason, and in the human ability to put our minds to problems and figure them out. The human mind made the world perfectable. The focus came down from God and onto human achievement, leading to progress.
Okay, so if that's true, then where are we now? What is the focus of 20th century music? And of course the answer is simple - it is the body.
The most popular music, world-wide, of the last century, is highly repetitive dance music - Rock and Roll (and its permutations - Rock, Pop, Rap/Hip Hop, Disco, Dance, etc). It wouldn't even sound like music to earlier composers, because it doesn't have the kind of melody lines or harmonization that they would be used to. It doesn't develop along a path, it just repeats back around, over and over. That is music that speaks to the hips, and the feet, not the mind or the heart.
The 20th century's music was about the body, and the 21st century's is as well - expanding into World Music, rhythms and sounds from places outside of Western Europe.
So, my place in music history is to write music based on simple, repetitive rhythms, and then play it together with other people, while also playing their compositions too.
Note: This blog post relies extremely heavily on the wonderful lectures of Professor Robert Greenberg.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Saturday, August 29, 2015
DIY - Celebrate Diversity
So, I've been listening to a series of lectures on the history of European Concert Music, and the lecturer does a great job of describing the cultural context and how it shaped the music of various periods.
He pointed out how Enlightenment values led to the Baroque era music of Bach and Corelli and all of them. It was the time of scientific and intellectual advancement, and of Martin Luther, and so the focus of the culture was off of God and onto human experience. The rise of the Middle Class meant that more people could attend concerts in the concert hall, and it led to a homgenization of concert music, driving all compositions to the common denominator. There was a demand for music that everyone would like. He pointed out that all national character was driven out of composition, and illustrated the point by playing sections of three sonatas of the time and asked us, the listeners, to try to identify the nationality of their composers. I guessed, maybe German, maybe French, maybe English? But it turns out all three composers were Czech. It was a powerful demonstration that all music sounded basically the same, and it was driven there by a desire to reach everyone and have everyone be equal - all compositions became equal as well.
In contrast, by the time you get to Beethoven, and then even more so during the Romantic era that followed, the emphasis was on the composer's individual expression. The lecturer played a section of a Baroque chamber music piece, and then played a section of the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. He described how we would identify the first piece - Continuo instruments, sonata form, regular tempo, theme expressed in polyphonic lines - Baroque era. It turns out it was composed by Corelli, but unless you were a Corelli specialist and were directly familiar with the piece already, nothing about it would tell you that. In contrast, the 5th Symphony is recognizably not just a piece from its era, not just from Germany, not just a Beethoven piece, but as that specific work. It sounds like nothing else but itself.
So, music history moved from compositions designed to appeal to everyone that ended up all sounding the same, to compositions designed to express the individual experience of the composer that have complete originality.
But that Romantic period was also the era of stars. To his point, we can now listen to Baroque pieces by any composer and appreciate them as works from their time, but even though there were probably just as many people composing during Beethoven's time, their work hasn't survived down to us, because Beethoven, the star, takes all the cultural bandwidth.
So, where are we today? We know that we are again in a period that emphasizes individual expression. That grand Communist impulse to form us into one big culture and one big political entity and have everything equal by being exactly the same, that fell when the Berlin Wall fell and is over and done (I remember running across that vision when I read the book "The Motorcycle Diaries", and hearing that the young Che Guevara had a dream of united all of South America into one big unified country, celebrating what they all had in common. It was so strange, an idea I not only had never heard of but just seemed completely unfathomable, given the era of revolution and nationalism and restoring of old boundaries out of the formerly large countries - the old Yugoslavia, the old Soviet Union, East Timor separating from Timor, South Sudan separating from Sudan). Here in the US, we have moved past the "Melting Pot" era, where we consider all Americans as Americans first, and encourage assimilation and casting off of one's home language and culture. Can you imagine that was ever the idea? Now we celebrate our patchwork identity. "Tossed Salad" is the new metaphor. We celebrate diversity. Every person is encouraged to express their authentic identify, and not be worried about conforming to old paradigms.
And, at the same time, the means of creative production have fallen into individual hands. The tools for making a film, taking an artful high-quality photograph, recording a multi-track record, using "Paint" to make an original image - and, of course, not to forget, self-referentially, free access to tools for writing and publishing your writings, yes, like this right here that I'm doing right now - the means of creative production are easily available and (almost) freely available to to (almost) all.
That new access, sure, has led to fragmentation. We're no longer in a "Hey Jude" era where everyone is listening to the same song at the same time. The magnitude and duration of our stars has declined. It has profoundly changed the industry and the means for making a living from artistic pursuits, However, it has enabled individual creative expression on a profoundly more broad scale.
So, that's my prediction, that we are in the culture era of fragmented, local, diverse composition. No one composer, no one performer, no one band, no one song may define our cultural moment. This moment is defined by all of us, each of us, finding our compositional voice.
The aspiration, then, should not be to become rich and famous like a 1960's rock star (the 1960's was the last hurrah of Romanticism, wasn't it, with debauched and overemotional heroes like Jim Morrison? I remember reading a piece about Dylan Thomas, who confronted his writer's block by drinking himself to death, and contrasted it with professional authors of today, one of whom said when he gets blocked, "Usually I go for a run."), because famous rock star is no longer a viable career. The aspiration, the aim, is to find your own sounds, and put them down (outside yourself and outside your own head), not so that the masses ever listen to them, but just as an indication that you are here.
He pointed out how Enlightenment values led to the Baroque era music of Bach and Corelli and all of them. It was the time of scientific and intellectual advancement, and of Martin Luther, and so the focus of the culture was off of God and onto human experience. The rise of the Middle Class meant that more people could attend concerts in the concert hall, and it led to a homgenization of concert music, driving all compositions to the common denominator. There was a demand for music that everyone would like. He pointed out that all national character was driven out of composition, and illustrated the point by playing sections of three sonatas of the time and asked us, the listeners, to try to identify the nationality of their composers. I guessed, maybe German, maybe French, maybe English? But it turns out all three composers were Czech. It was a powerful demonstration that all music sounded basically the same, and it was driven there by a desire to reach everyone and have everyone be equal - all compositions became equal as well.
In contrast, by the time you get to Beethoven, and then even more so during the Romantic era that followed, the emphasis was on the composer's individual expression. The lecturer played a section of a Baroque chamber music piece, and then played a section of the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. He described how we would identify the first piece - Continuo instruments, sonata form, regular tempo, theme expressed in polyphonic lines - Baroque era. It turns out it was composed by Corelli, but unless you were a Corelli specialist and were directly familiar with the piece already, nothing about it would tell you that. In contrast, the 5th Symphony is recognizably not just a piece from its era, not just from Germany, not just a Beethoven piece, but as that specific work. It sounds like nothing else but itself.
So, music history moved from compositions designed to appeal to everyone that ended up all sounding the same, to compositions designed to express the individual experience of the composer that have complete originality.
But that Romantic period was also the era of stars. To his point, we can now listen to Baroque pieces by any composer and appreciate them as works from their time, but even though there were probably just as many people composing during Beethoven's time, their work hasn't survived down to us, because Beethoven, the star, takes all the cultural bandwidth.
So, where are we today? We know that we are again in a period that emphasizes individual expression. That grand Communist impulse to form us into one big culture and one big political entity and have everything equal by being exactly the same, that fell when the Berlin Wall fell and is over and done (I remember running across that vision when I read the book "The Motorcycle Diaries", and hearing that the young Che Guevara had a dream of united all of South America into one big unified country, celebrating what they all had in common. It was so strange, an idea I not only had never heard of but just seemed completely unfathomable, given the era of revolution and nationalism and restoring of old boundaries out of the formerly large countries - the old Yugoslavia, the old Soviet Union, East Timor separating from Timor, South Sudan separating from Sudan). Here in the US, we have moved past the "Melting Pot" era, where we consider all Americans as Americans first, and encourage assimilation and casting off of one's home language and culture. Can you imagine that was ever the idea? Now we celebrate our patchwork identity. "Tossed Salad" is the new metaphor. We celebrate diversity. Every person is encouraged to express their authentic identify, and not be worried about conforming to old paradigms.
And, at the same time, the means of creative production have fallen into individual hands. The tools for making a film, taking an artful high-quality photograph, recording a multi-track record, using "Paint" to make an original image - and, of course, not to forget, self-referentially, free access to tools for writing and publishing your writings, yes, like this right here that I'm doing right now - the means of creative production are easily available and (almost) freely available to to (almost) all.
That new access, sure, has led to fragmentation. We're no longer in a "Hey Jude" era where everyone is listening to the same song at the same time. The magnitude and duration of our stars has declined. It has profoundly changed the industry and the means for making a living from artistic pursuits, However, it has enabled individual creative expression on a profoundly more broad scale.
So, that's my prediction, that we are in the culture era of fragmented, local, diverse composition. No one composer, no one performer, no one band, no one song may define our cultural moment. This moment is defined by all of us, each of us, finding our compositional voice.
The aspiration, then, should not be to become rich and famous like a 1960's rock star (the 1960's was the last hurrah of Romanticism, wasn't it, with debauched and overemotional heroes like Jim Morrison? I remember reading a piece about Dylan Thomas, who confronted his writer's block by drinking himself to death, and contrasted it with professional authors of today, one of whom said when he gets blocked, "Usually I go for a run."), because famous rock star is no longer a viable career. The aspiration, the aim, is to find your own sounds, and put them down (outside yourself and outside your own head), not so that the masses ever listen to them, but just as an indication that you are here.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Silly Love Songs
In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, my favorite staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote a review of a number of books, but mainly this one book, "Love Songs: The Hidden History" by Ted Gioia.
The article traces the history of love poetry from troubadour poets through modern pop songs, but spends a great deal of time on Shakespeare's Sonnets.
I read this article at a time when I have been pondering the Love Song generally.
I remember noticing back in college when I was making mix tapes that most love songs are songs about love unrequited. Longing and lack and frustration drive people to write songs. Heartbreak and loss and disappointment drive people to write songs. Hardly anyone ever writes a song when they are happy, and in a fulfilling and mutual relationship. Probably they don't have time, was the theory I developed at the time. Or they have nothing to say - happiness just kind of sits inarticulately, centered within itself, but pain and loss and longing generate a storm of words in the mind.
This week we have been immersed in the musical tradition of the American South, between about 1905 and 1950, the rise and dispersion of Blues music, through the migration of Black (African-American) people to rural areas in the South, and then on to urban areas in South and North.
The tradition develops alongside a Gospel tradition, but in parallel and separate - one voice in a documentary on Blind Willie McTell says that when his sister brought Blind Willie home to meet her family, he, her brother, was afraid they were all going to Hell from knowing this man. Blues music was not accepted by those who used Gospel music to glorify God (although the story went on to tell how McTell learned Gospel songs as well, which ingratiated him into his wife's family, and made him one of the rare musicians of the time to play in both traditions).
If you listen to lots of recordings of Blues music from this period, there are no love songs. There are lots of descriptions of life itself, and locations, and travelling, and work. There are descriptions of fights and disagreements and misunderstandings. There are testaments of hard luck and loss of hope and weariness. There are a lot of songs about sex. But nothing that would sound like a Romantic Poet's words to the object of his affection. No descriptions of otherworldly beauty, comparing one's love to the stars or the sun or to Heaven, no threats that one will die without the return of his beloved's affections.
There isn't even this same kind of tenor in the Gospel music. The stories they pick from the Bible to turn into songs, the ones that come to mind to me most quickly although I'll be the first to admit I haven't studied this tradition at all, but to the outsider the first ones that come to mind are all about places, and journeys - the River Jordan, Jacob's Ladder. Journeying, getting to a good place, going Home. Not having your soul rapt in transcendent euphoria. That is a white, European tradition.
It's the one I grew up with, though. The theme through all the sad songs of longing on those mix tapes. I grew up immersed in a particular cultural understand of Love, and attraction (and longing and need and lust and all the rest).
I understand that, and understand that not everyone grew up in the same one, in fact almost no one really, except maybe other girls who grew up about that same time, which doesn't help me at all.
But the act of interacting outside that culture, and expecting more matter of fact approaches to living and to each other, I can get my brain to go along with it as a project, but my heart is lagging behind.
June, moon, spoon.
The article traces the history of love poetry from troubadour poets through modern pop songs, but spends a great deal of time on Shakespeare's Sonnets.
I read this article at a time when I have been pondering the Love Song generally.
I remember noticing back in college when I was making mix tapes that most love songs are songs about love unrequited. Longing and lack and frustration drive people to write songs. Heartbreak and loss and disappointment drive people to write songs. Hardly anyone ever writes a song when they are happy, and in a fulfilling and mutual relationship. Probably they don't have time, was the theory I developed at the time. Or they have nothing to say - happiness just kind of sits inarticulately, centered within itself, but pain and loss and longing generate a storm of words in the mind.
This week we have been immersed in the musical tradition of the American South, between about 1905 and 1950, the rise and dispersion of Blues music, through the migration of Black (African-American) people to rural areas in the South, and then on to urban areas in South and North.
The tradition develops alongside a Gospel tradition, but in parallel and separate - one voice in a documentary on Blind Willie McTell says that when his sister brought Blind Willie home to meet her family, he, her brother, was afraid they were all going to Hell from knowing this man. Blues music was not accepted by those who used Gospel music to glorify God (although the story went on to tell how McTell learned Gospel songs as well, which ingratiated him into his wife's family, and made him one of the rare musicians of the time to play in both traditions).
If you listen to lots of recordings of Blues music from this period, there are no love songs. There are lots of descriptions of life itself, and locations, and travelling, and work. There are descriptions of fights and disagreements and misunderstandings. There are testaments of hard luck and loss of hope and weariness. There are a lot of songs about sex. But nothing that would sound like a Romantic Poet's words to the object of his affection. No descriptions of otherworldly beauty, comparing one's love to the stars or the sun or to Heaven, no threats that one will die without the return of his beloved's affections.
There isn't even this same kind of tenor in the Gospel music. The stories they pick from the Bible to turn into songs, the ones that come to mind to me most quickly although I'll be the first to admit I haven't studied this tradition at all, but to the outsider the first ones that come to mind are all about places, and journeys - the River Jordan, Jacob's Ladder. Journeying, getting to a good place, going Home. Not having your soul rapt in transcendent euphoria. That is a white, European tradition.
It's the one I grew up with, though. The theme through all the sad songs of longing on those mix tapes. I grew up immersed in a particular cultural understand of Love, and attraction (and longing and need and lust and all the rest).
I understand that, and understand that not everyone grew up in the same one, in fact almost no one really, except maybe other girls who grew up about that same time, which doesn't help me at all.
But the act of interacting outside that culture, and expecting more matter of fact approaches to living and to each other, I can get my brain to go along with it as a project, but my heart is lagging behind.
June, moon, spoon.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Hard Work For Them
We were in Green Bay to see the band The Twistin Tarantulas, my partner, his brother and I.
They are a punk-rockabilly band - their music is right on the boundary between the two. Very fast, very funny. Only one original member was touring with them, the bass player and singer. The other members were quite a bit younger, but killer players, so the music was exciting and accomplished and fun.
The three of us all are guitar owners and guitar players, and we have gone out to see bands and have been collecting records for all of our respective lives. We know lots of musicians, and so we know what they have to do, first to be able to play at that level, and second to live the life. This band is out of Detroit, but had travelled all together in a van to Wisconsin, to play for a couple of hours in this dark bar to this baker's dozen of people.
We know that touring bands make most of their money from merchandise, and this band had just finished recording a new CD, which the bass player-singer promoted from the stage. He said, "We just finished a new album," so see him after the show to pick one up, and support the band. "We worked hard on it. And hard work should be rewarded! So come by after the show and pick up our new CD. Here's a song from it..."
There was a skinny, weedy guy standing next to me, beer in his hand. Sinewy, maybe, is a better description. Not young, not a young guy, maybe 40's, but they had obviously been a tough 40-some years. Jean jacket, maybe. After this speech from the bass player, this guy caught my eye and smiled. He leaned over and said in my ear, which you had to do because the bar was so loud, he said, "Hard work! Hard work for them might be the tips of their fingers get a little sore." He curled his left hand and gestured to the fingertips with one of the fingers from his beer-holding hand.
I was struck because this was so opposite from my beliefs about touring punk-rockabilly musicians. I knew that all three of us were there to bear witness in awe to their might and grandeur, dreaming but knowing that we could never, even if we started today and gave everything to it, never play as well as they were playing, and do what they do. I had been standing there in that shared knowledge and admiration, so this perspective was so opposite, but then looking at the guy, you knew that in fact he did know hard work, and none of us had any grounds to say anything different about it.
My boyfriend said several days later - "I realized at the time, I just had the 'Money For Nothing' conversation."
They are a punk-rockabilly band - their music is right on the boundary between the two. Very fast, very funny. Only one original member was touring with them, the bass player and singer. The other members were quite a bit younger, but killer players, so the music was exciting and accomplished and fun.
The three of us all are guitar owners and guitar players, and we have gone out to see bands and have been collecting records for all of our respective lives. We know lots of musicians, and so we know what they have to do, first to be able to play at that level, and second to live the life. This band is out of Detroit, but had travelled all together in a van to Wisconsin, to play for a couple of hours in this dark bar to this baker's dozen of people.
We know that touring bands make most of their money from merchandise, and this band had just finished recording a new CD, which the bass player-singer promoted from the stage. He said, "We just finished a new album," so see him after the show to pick one up, and support the band. "We worked hard on it. And hard work should be rewarded! So come by after the show and pick up our new CD. Here's a song from it..."
There was a skinny, weedy guy standing next to me, beer in his hand. Sinewy, maybe, is a better description. Not young, not a young guy, maybe 40's, but they had obviously been a tough 40-some years. Jean jacket, maybe. After this speech from the bass player, this guy caught my eye and smiled. He leaned over and said in my ear, which you had to do because the bar was so loud, he said, "Hard work! Hard work for them might be the tips of their fingers get a little sore." He curled his left hand and gestured to the fingertips with one of the fingers from his beer-holding hand.
I was struck because this was so opposite from my beliefs about touring punk-rockabilly musicians. I knew that all three of us were there to bear witness in awe to their might and grandeur, dreaming but knowing that we could never, even if we started today and gave everything to it, never play as well as they were playing, and do what they do. I had been standing there in that shared knowledge and admiration, so this perspective was so opposite, but then looking at the guy, you knew that in fact he did know hard work, and none of us had any grounds to say anything different about it.
My boyfriend said several days later - "I realized at the time, I just had the 'Money For Nothing' conversation."
The Value of Music is the Experience of the Listener
So my pondering continues. Where is value generated in music? Not just where is the money generated, because we know the answer to that question, sort of, but then also, due to the Music Industry currently undergoing so much change, and threats to its old business model and techniques of sustainability, the answers are probably also too temporary - where the money comes from today is probably not going to be where the money comes from tomorrow.
So I try to go more essential. Where is surplus value generated, that could be skimmed off to sustain the life of the musician?
Three different sources recently tell me that it's the experience of the listener.
One: I'm still making my way through the Audio book of Philip Glass's new autobiography, Words Without Music. When telling of his early career, just out of music school and during a time of modern revolution in many art forms, he quotes a colleague who I'll have to back and see if it was a teacher or friend or inspirational mentor, or possibly a Yogi because he spent quite a bit of time in India at various ashrams studying those traditions, he quotes a colleague who said that the aim of performance is to create transcendent experiences in the audience. The colleague says that's why they were stripping out traditional narrative, and the expected trappings of traditional theater. By removing those familiar things, and presenting experimental live experiences, it create the possibility for a transcendent experience in the audience members. Philip Glass signs on and says that the music and theatrical experiences he composed are designed to do that too.
Two: My guitar teacher and his wife were visiting, and on that visit he talked about a rehearsal that his band recently had inside a dance studio, in front of mirrors. They were working on their use of the stage, in terms of their own movements and their interactions with others in the band, and they had been working with a friend of his wife who has a background in theater and stage management. What he said they picked up is that how you move can help put the song across better for an audience. You can create an experience in the audience just by playing the song, but by then also stepping back so that the featured performer is out in front just at a certain time when their part is important, or by coming up all together instead of moving separately, it reinforces what's going on in the music and more strongly creates the experience in the audience. I had just seen his band, at what turned out to be a show right after this mirror practice, and had in fact obtained the experience that he described, which I reliably get at each of their shows, sometimes not until right before the end of the first set, but every time, I hit those heights where the music is moving me and lifting me up, and I feel like the crowd is one entity, and that we're all in the experience together. Usually they are playing Photograph by Def Leppard when this happens, so I'm sure part of it is my past experience and life-long fandom of the song. But that's definitely why I go see them, and why I love doing it.
Three: This video, posted on the Facebook page of a college classmate who has continued performing ever since, as a dancer, and also as part of this band. Just look at the people in the crowd. Right there, that is the value of music performance, plain as day.
So I try to go more essential. Where is surplus value generated, that could be skimmed off to sustain the life of the musician?
Three different sources recently tell me that it's the experience of the listener.
One: I'm still making my way through the Audio book of Philip Glass's new autobiography, Words Without Music. When telling of his early career, just out of music school and during a time of modern revolution in many art forms, he quotes a colleague who I'll have to back and see if it was a teacher or friend or inspirational mentor, or possibly a Yogi because he spent quite a bit of time in India at various ashrams studying those traditions, he quotes a colleague who said that the aim of performance is to create transcendent experiences in the audience. The colleague says that's why they were stripping out traditional narrative, and the expected trappings of traditional theater. By removing those familiar things, and presenting experimental live experiences, it create the possibility for a transcendent experience in the audience members. Philip Glass signs on and says that the music and theatrical experiences he composed are designed to do that too.
Two: My guitar teacher and his wife were visiting, and on that visit he talked about a rehearsal that his band recently had inside a dance studio, in front of mirrors. They were working on their use of the stage, in terms of their own movements and their interactions with others in the band, and they had been working with a friend of his wife who has a background in theater and stage management. What he said they picked up is that how you move can help put the song across better for an audience. You can create an experience in the audience just by playing the song, but by then also stepping back so that the featured performer is out in front just at a certain time when their part is important, or by coming up all together instead of moving separately, it reinforces what's going on in the music and more strongly creates the experience in the audience. I had just seen his band, at what turned out to be a show right after this mirror practice, and had in fact obtained the experience that he described, which I reliably get at each of their shows, sometimes not until right before the end of the first set, but every time, I hit those heights where the music is moving me and lifting me up, and I feel like the crowd is one entity, and that we're all in the experience together. Usually they are playing Photograph by Def Leppard when this happens, so I'm sure part of it is my past experience and life-long fandom of the song. But that's definitely why I go see them, and why I love doing it.
Three: This video, posted on the Facebook page of a college classmate who has continued performing ever since, as a dancer, and also as part of this band. Just look at the people in the crowd. Right there, that is the value of music performance, plain as day.
AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH-Jeffrey Family Reunion 06202015
Posted by Kyle Primous and K Street on Thursday, June 25, 2015
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
The Music Business
One thing I've been able to stand back and observe about myself, with the wisdom of age and perspective, is that in stressy work situations, those that inspire frustration and anger, but even more so those that could be construed as some kind of personal failure, I have a reflexive "flight" response.
Usually, that desire to just walk out and go do a different job is fixated on some particular alternative that has presented itself to my imagination. The most recent time this happened, there happened to be a position posted at my local music store for a Music Education Manager.
My guitar teacher talked me down from actually walking out of my current day job, so I never did formally apply for the Music Education Manager position, but it has haunted me in fantasy ever since, and is still my go-to Happy Place imaginary alternative work position, on days of high stress (before this it was to be the new owner of a shop that sells bird houses and birdseed, at which I had noticed a "Business for Sale" sign, but that has been sold to new owners so that path is, for now, closed to me).
Then, recently, an actual professional Music Education professional of my acquaintance posted a Facebook link to an article online that injoined Music Educators to stop trying to rationalize the value of music education by linking it to work-related transferable skills that the students could gain. This was a wrong and dangerous path, the article argued. Music has intrinsic value. It is around us all the time, and it is of intrinsic value to learn more about it.
And then, just this morning, a college classmate posted a Facebook link to an article that made basically an identical argument, but this time about Liberal Arts education generally. Stop trying to argue that a Liberal Arts degree has value primarily for the job skills that graduates can bring to the workforce. Liberal Arts have intrinsic value. They are important in themselves.
This subject matter has been top of mind in my State recently, as our right-wing, non-University educated Governor continues to slash budgets not just for childhood education but for the reknowned state university system, and news spread among my peers like wildfire a few weeks ago when he "accidentally" struck out the "search for truth" part of the Univeristy's Mission, and replaced it with "training the future workforce".
Those of us who have and have provided for others Liberal Arts education, and those Music Educators of my acquaintance, both feel very strongly that education is different from trade school, that it has intrinsic value beyond the workplace skills it may indirectly provide, and that a developed society should provide it to its citizens.
So, having done an MBA as well, following my Liberal Arts degree (and two more graduate degrees in between, in a fiercely impractical subject matter), and also having been wondering how I could flee my current day job but still live in the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed, lately what's been on my mind is, where does the value derive, for Music Education (and by extension music itself, the existence of it and the listening to it as an audience member but also the opportunity to learn about it and make it oneself)?
What are the economics, here, and how can they be played into a decent replacement salary for me?
The other input to these musings is the new book by composer Philip Glass. The section of the book that has stayed with me was his description of his music education, which he received in France on a Fulbright scholarship. The intense, difficult, grueling training that he describes was essential for him to become a composer, because composition requires a breadth of musical expertise. And he needed to be pretty darned good to be able to go beyond any composer who had lived before in history, and to extend the form in revolutionary ways, as he did (as he has). He describes what he was trying to bring to the audience of his pieces (transcendence, basically). He states what he thinks music is for (to learn to listen), in contrast with other art forms (dance is to learn to move, writing is to learn to speak, painting is to learn to see, I can't remember what else).
But, is that enough? To devote a whole, whole human life to? To delve in and learn and learn and practice and practice, to suffer and be punished and humiliated and struggle and think and analyze and practice and remold yourself into a musician, into a music creator, into a music revolutionary who expressed something essential about our epoch in a way that no one else every quite did - is it worth it?
Usually, that desire to just walk out and go do a different job is fixated on some particular alternative that has presented itself to my imagination. The most recent time this happened, there happened to be a position posted at my local music store for a Music Education Manager.
My guitar teacher talked me down from actually walking out of my current day job, so I never did formally apply for the Music Education Manager position, but it has haunted me in fantasy ever since, and is still my go-to Happy Place imaginary alternative work position, on days of high stress (before this it was to be the new owner of a shop that sells bird houses and birdseed, at which I had noticed a "Business for Sale" sign, but that has been sold to new owners so that path is, for now, closed to me).
Then, recently, an actual professional Music Education professional of my acquaintance posted a Facebook link to an article online that injoined Music Educators to stop trying to rationalize the value of music education by linking it to work-related transferable skills that the students could gain. This was a wrong and dangerous path, the article argued. Music has intrinsic value. It is around us all the time, and it is of intrinsic value to learn more about it.
And then, just this morning, a college classmate posted a Facebook link to an article that made basically an identical argument, but this time about Liberal Arts education generally. Stop trying to argue that a Liberal Arts degree has value primarily for the job skills that graduates can bring to the workforce. Liberal Arts have intrinsic value. They are important in themselves.
This subject matter has been top of mind in my State recently, as our right-wing, non-University educated Governor continues to slash budgets not just for childhood education but for the reknowned state university system, and news spread among my peers like wildfire a few weeks ago when he "accidentally" struck out the "search for truth" part of the Univeristy's Mission, and replaced it with "training the future workforce".
Those of us who have and have provided for others Liberal Arts education, and those Music Educators of my acquaintance, both feel very strongly that education is different from trade school, that it has intrinsic value beyond the workplace skills it may indirectly provide, and that a developed society should provide it to its citizens.
So, having done an MBA as well, following my Liberal Arts degree (and two more graduate degrees in between, in a fiercely impractical subject matter), and also having been wondering how I could flee my current day job but still live in the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed, lately what's been on my mind is, where does the value derive, for Music Education (and by extension music itself, the existence of it and the listening to it as an audience member but also the opportunity to learn about it and make it oneself)?
What are the economics, here, and how can they be played into a decent replacement salary for me?
The other input to these musings is the new book by composer Philip Glass. The section of the book that has stayed with me was his description of his music education, which he received in France on a Fulbright scholarship. The intense, difficult, grueling training that he describes was essential for him to become a composer, because composition requires a breadth of musical expertise. And he needed to be pretty darned good to be able to go beyond any composer who had lived before in history, and to extend the form in revolutionary ways, as he did (as he has). He describes what he was trying to bring to the audience of his pieces (transcendence, basically). He states what he thinks music is for (to learn to listen), in contrast with other art forms (dance is to learn to move, writing is to learn to speak, painting is to learn to see, I can't remember what else).
But, is that enough? To devote a whole, whole human life to? To delve in and learn and learn and practice and practice, to suffer and be punished and humiliated and struggle and think and analyze and practice and remold yourself into a musician, into a music creator, into a music revolutionary who expressed something essential about our epoch in a way that no one else every quite did - is it worth it?
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Poem: Mixing Suchness
Mixing Suchness
It's late evening and the room is dark
We pull up our chairs and sit close,
my arm through your arm,
like we were in a theater or at the show
Watching the sound waves as they pass would be too distracting
so we turn off the lights
and look together into the glassy black
You have taken days, but the mix is good
balanced left and right
shimmering without hiss
balanced low and high
and the warm human voices come up like a blanket underneath
A ghost of blue light tries to get our attention
as alerts and warnings always do
but we stay with the sound
We are still and listen
The first one ends in bird song
The second one ends with the cymbals' decay and dying away
It's late evening and the room is dark
We pull up our chairs and sit close,
my arm through your arm,
like we were in a theater or at the show
Watching the sound waves as they pass would be too distracting
so we turn off the lights
and look together into the glassy black
You have taken days, but the mix is good
balanced left and right
shimmering without hiss
balanced low and high
and the warm human voices come up like a blanket underneath
A ghost of blue light tries to get our attention
as alerts and warnings always do
but we stay with the sound
We are still and listen
The first one ends in bird song
The second one ends with the cymbals' decay and dying away
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