Playing and Making

Music performance and composition:

Lots of us play musical instruments, or sing. I play adequately, and I sing well (albeit not this week, thanks to pneumonia). But I was not a performance major, practicing several hours per day. I was a composition major. My urge has always been to Make, rather than recreate.

I do believe you have to be able to do both. I can read music like a sonofabitch, and I could do so even before I went to music school. I've been musical since I was 4 or 5 years old. I started piano at age 6 or 7, and I started singing in choir and chorus at that age, as well. The Lutheran church in Ann Arbor that my family went to had a music staff who were at the University of Michigan, and we did a lot of ambitious music in church choir: before age 24 I had sung probably a third of all the Bach Cantatas, some more than once. So I have some pretty good performance chops.

But I'll never be as good a Chapman Stick player, or bassist, as several of my friends are. I don't put in the practice time. (I'm not a slacker. In fact, for most of my adult life, I had an undiagnosed chronic illness that sapped my strength and willpower, and which I will spend the rest of my life recovering from.) There was a period in my 30s when I was in several bands that focused on improvised music; so you could say I was composing on a weekly basis, and playing spontaneous music. But most of that went direct to recording, and was never notated. It's only in the past five or six years that I've begun seriously notating written music scores again, and I've been prolific throughout this period. (Within the limitations of chronic illness and post-illness, always.) When I was in my 30s I did not suck as a player, but in fact I'm a better player now, even though I play gigs less often: time and experience do that, no matter what age you begin. I don't have as many opportunities to play, which sucks, but on balance I'm musically satisfied because I'm writing more.

My focus was always on Making. On writing music. On composing. I have been reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, which made a comparison between Shorter's meticulous writing of music and Joe Zawinul's habit of improvising a piece, then transcribing it, and declaring it done. Actually, I do both. Both of those methods work for me. Most of the music I recorded in my 30s and 40s was never notated, but it WAS recorded, and stands as pieces. I did on occasion transcribe music I had recorded and made it into a score others could play. ("Night/Fire" on my album The Western Lands was done this way.) If I had enough energy, or an assistant, I could transcribe most of what I recorded in those years, and give you a score you could play from. (But I don't. If I have any regrets about surviving chronic illness, it's that I never had the energy to do what I wanted to do, and so much never got finished.)

You see, that's been the trade-off: I will never learn to play as many songs as many of my friends do, and I'll never play them as well as they do. (Mostly. I do have my moments.) But most of them don't compose as much I do, either. That's the trade-off I observed way back in music school, where I was majoring as a composer: what your emphasis is, is probably what it will in future. Bruce Cockburn, the great songwriter, once said something that really stuck with me: "I don't know many songs that I didn't write." (He then said, "But this is one of them," and launched into Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." A song, I might add, that I also know, that I didn't write.)

In music school I focused on making new music; all of us music school students who were not performance-track were required to play or sing, and have declared instruments, but even then in my piano and percussion minors I preferred to focus on new music. (Or music so old it was new all over again: hence my minors in Medieval and Renaissance music.) In music school, and after, I was involved with a group of composers and performers who presented concerts of new music several times a year; some of us were both performers and composers, and traded hats as needed. It was a very fertile ground upon which to write and have performed new music scores. It was also the time in which I began to learn to play jazz, and improvise.

Im not sure why I wanted to write about this, today. Maybe it's because I never stop thinking about music, no matter what else is going on. Maybe it's because I see some of my Stick playing pals and other musician pals having all these minor and major successes in their musical lives that make me want to stand up and cheer. And I do cheer! And then, sometimes, I think about how the touring musician life was never one I could take on (undiagnosed chronic illness, for one; opportunities, for another). It makes me very happy to see some of my friends out there on the road, and to get to their concerts as often as I am able (energy permitting: I'd go to a hell of a lot more concerts if I had the strength).

I genuinely enjoy hearing my friends make their music. I love hearing what they do. I'll never play as well as they do, and I'm okay with that.

And then I go home and go back to writing. It's just what I do.

Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

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So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

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Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

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Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

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Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

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It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Tango and Milonga

Over the past winter I wrote a pair of instrumental pieces to be performed with dance, and they were premiered live in March, with wonderful dancing. I have listened to and enjoyed tango for many years, although I had never written in the genre before this. The process of analyzing (yes, we do use that music theory we learned in music school, sometimes) and figuring out what I wanted to write was a long process, with several false starts and blind alleys explored before I reached that point where I often write my best music: the feel and style of the genre becomes internalized, and I write by following my ear rather than from an intellectual outline. Once I had done that, these two interlocked pieces appeared, one a fierce, fast tango, and the other a slow, inward but still darkly passionate milonga. Part of my loves the milonga form above all, because of its inwardness, its passion and melancholy, and the feel of a very late night after you have survived something dangerous, exhausted and sad but still glad to be alive.

When we premiered the tango and milonga live, with dance, I thought it went very well, and I got some good feedback about it. This is the kind of music I love to play, to accompany dancers. I've played a lot of live dance concert music, some of it improvised, over the years, and the excitement of live interaction never gets old. So everything went well. But we didn't get a very good recording, mostly due to my errors of mic placement; well, it was a new unfamiliar room to perform in, and I guessed wrong. So a few weeks later, we set up a living room recording live session, and made some good recordings of the music. These videos are from that session. The live music vibe is still there, I think, as we recorded live to two-track from the room sound, and I didn't try to over-produce or over-control the session. We just set everything up, turned it on, and played each piece several times till we felt we had played it well and made a good take. I edited that session down into these short music videos. I may at some point edit down the premiere performances, with the dancers; that will happen if I can get the audio to a place where I like it well enough to share. So stay tuned.

Tango of the Knife Fight:



Milonga of the Time of Leaves:



Daniel Atwater: Accordion
Brian Schultz: Piano
Arthur Durkee: Chapman Stick

Written, Produced & Engineered by Arthur Durkee. ©2014 AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.

Heartlands: Notes Before a Premiere

As we approach the premiere(s) of "Heartlands," now less than a month away, I find myself struggling with tension, anxiety and worry. The premiere of a major piece of music which I wrote is bringing out anxiety caused by inherited latent perfectionism (thanks, Mom) and worry about my future. I want this to be the beginning of a new musical, not the end of one. So, pre-concert jitters, nerves, and worries.

Just to be clear, not all this tension and stress is negative. I'm also excited, breathless with anticipation, and hope. It's all mixed together. There is joy and gratitude in the mix as well.

Thus I must remind myself to let go, relax, breathe. This has been a very stressful period of life—not just because the mixed tension/anticipation regarding these concert premieres, but because of everything else going in life, as well. It's worth remembering that I wrote "Heartlands" in and around an episode of a chronic illness reaching its climax, followed by major surgery, then recovery, and gradual, slow return to something like normative health. It's worth remembering that all of this happened at the same time, all intertwined, and that none of these journeys are ended. Gratitude and fear are part of that mix as well.

My anxiety is partly because of the upcoming concert premieres—it's excitement and anticipation as much as it is worry or anxiety, as I said—and partly because I still am making no progress on moving forward with my medical journey. That's been stuck and causing me suffering for many months now, with no end to it in sight. I have been ignoring it recently, to some extent, focusing instead on the music and the arts-related career, doing marketing and website building and other tasks related to building this future. A lot of the time, as a result, emotionally I've been living in the future or the past, not the present moment. I've been coping with all this by making art, making things, making photographs, video, writing music, and more. It's a way to stay in my body most days, and not be lost to worry and anxiety. Sometimes temporary distraction is the correct response to an unsolvable problem.

I've been having many nightmares lately, and remembering them when I wake—anxiety dreams, really, stress dreams which I wake from already feeling tense and anxious. Starting off your day already tense is not wise.

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Last night, though, in the last dream before waking, I encountered a Native American elder at a musical instrument store, who blessed me with tobacco smoke from his pipe. This musical instrument store, which I wandered into as it was adjacent to another store where I was friends with the owner, had several vintage Chapman Sticks for sale, and I was enjoying talking to owner as a player with inside knowledge about the history of the instrument. Then I asked to use the bathroom, and when I emerged I met a talkative Native man who seemed aware of that normally-hidden side of my self that is bound up with shamanism and spirituality; he took me over to another part of the store, or a place connected by the same space, where a quiet Native American elder was seated with his wife under a canopy, a square of tanned leather held aloft at the corners by wooden poles, decorated with feathers and beads. This elder took his medicine pipe and blew smoke over my body and aura, blessing me. This morning I woke from that dream, still aware of the anxiety I have been feeling lately, but aware too of feeling "talked to" by the spirits. Shut up and accept the blessings you've been given; shut up and be smoked; have faith that despite all your trials that you are indeed on the right path, the sacred way, the proper road for your life's purpose. When dreams are this lucid, this clear in their message, you'd best pay attention.

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Part of me would love to run away, right now, spend time by the ocean, in the Florida Keys, in California, or spend time alone in the deserts and mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona. Time in the desert, time by the water, are good for clearing out the mind, for ridding oneself of mental clutter, for recharging those inner batteries, storing up serenity inside oneself that can last for awhile. I need a nature break. I could use a short camping trip, maybe nearby, since I'm too busy before the concerts to spare much time or energy. I have to remind myself to seek out peaceful places, near to home as well as far away, to find rest and solace of spirit. I have to remind myself to take time away from Everything to just be. Be still. Meditate. Rest. Recharge.

I find partial escape by looking at and preparing for printing those photographs that I have made in the Southwest, and by the Pacific. The images can take me back in memory, at least somewhat, and I can hear a little of that desert silence that I find so healing and refreshing, whenever I travel there. Some of the most healing moments, out in the desert, miles from anywhere, have been when I pull over, turn off the engine, get out of the truck, and just stand and listen to the silence for awhile. More than once, I've found that stillness, that silence, to be so refreshing, so penetrating into my mental clutter, so relieving of the stresses of the day, that ten minutes of desert silence are worth about a month of talk therapy. The outdoors is my refuge.

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," said Thoreau. Also the preservation of my psychological well-being.

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Yesterday towards late afternoon I went and spent an hour in the Japanese garden a few miles from home. It was a windy day, full of fitful clouds and changing light. The beach at the manmade lake nearby was full of people, all ages cooling off from the high afternoon heat of the day, screaming kids, a volleyball game or two, and elders sitting peacefully in the shade offered by the thick trees. I went along the water's edge till I reached the Japanese part of the gardens, and spent the rest of my time there. People came through occasionally, but I had it mostly to myself for long stretches of time. Just the sounds of wind in the trees, and the water splashing in the waterfall and creek next to the open-sided meditation hall. Rustic, designed like an tea-room, with a latticed round window to the east, two walls open, two walls with benches for sitting.

I spent a long time at the meditation hall, just letting tension fall away. As I always do when in the japanese garden, I made some photographs—but photography for me is a form of meditation as much as it is art-making. And this time I shot several video elements which I will later assemble into a garden meditation video. I already have an idea for the music track: a shakuhachi solo with meditation bells, that I recorded a few months ago for a meditation CD, Darshan. Or maybe something newly recorded, but in that style. Music that is almost motionless, in contrast to the high winds recorded in my video shots.

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I will go to the meditation hall in the garden again soon, if I need a break in the late afternoon. I don't have time to take a long roadtrip right now, not with my musical commitments reaching a peak level. But I can take short nature breaks, meditate out in the woods and gardens. I have to remind myself to do this, to cope, to maintain a level of serenity that enhances everything I do. Just keep breathing. Just keep swimming. Just be.

Video: Snow

Snow, a winter video poem, 2012

The artistic constraint used in making this piece was simplicity: this is a single long video take made from the front porch of my old house, during a blizzard in March 2008. That winter we had several blizzards like this, and record snowfall numbers. This was a single long take made when no cars were driving by, because of the storm, and I could get a long take of snow being blown hard through the trees, and off the roof of the house.

The music is similarly constrained: it is an improvised piece played live to stereo recording, with a little processing later. I played my Chapman Stick through an effects box direct into the computer, then added Frippertronics-style tape-loop effects (in this case made using the remarkable VST plugin Ellotronix.)

The haiku was written at the same time as the blizzard was filmed.

under fresh snow
white flowers bloom anyway:
the days passing

Very simple constraints were used, then, producing a focus on one mood, one moment, one vision.

Opening Languages

In January 2012, I played live improvised music for two consecutive evenings for the opening of an art gallery retrospective show by my artist friend John Steines. The retrospective show in Madison was called Languages, Acquired and Intuitive, featuring mostly oils painted over a period of some years. In his artist statement, John writes, in part:

Art, the language of images, is both necessary and crippling. Images can and do speak, but experiencing art means that we must participate: We need to create anchors into understanding. The individual experience of life as art and created into art evolves out of intense personal process.

The work in this show communicates that which is unwritten and un-writable for me. The pieces amplify my experience and the way I have lived. I want to give life to the universal within the vernacular, all of it situated in a large common public space—to open public conversation of my own understanding of meaning and experience.

This speaks to me of the sometimes pre-verbal, inarticulate nature of art, even of poetry which often fails to contain life's experiences in mere words. Art can communicate, and does, but indeed we must participate: we complete the meaning of art by finding within it hooks into our own lives, our own experience. One core aspect of the haiku aesthetic is the idea that the reader completes the poem, out of his own life's experience. The spareness of the haiku form, and its reliance on imagery rather than didactic telling, leaves the door open for readers to bring their own experience to the poem, to find within it echoes from their own lives and emotions. Some of the mystery and beauty of haiku is that we do in fact share with the poet the experience of the poem.

That kind of connecting is what good art does, sometimes seemingly effortlessly. I have often felt that connection, when deeply involved with playing music for an audience, or when writing a poem at white heat. I don't seek out these moments as the purpose of my art-making, but I thoroughly immerse myself in them when they do occur.

I sat in a corner of the gallery for two cold nights in early winter, playing whatever music I was moved to create on the spot. This isn't my first improvised solo gig, nor my first gallery gig. I enjoy playing gallery gigs, actually, as I like to be able to create ambient soundscapes that can take a long time to develop and change. It's inspiring to being sitting in a room surrounded by beauty, by art, by the feelings that the art evokes, and that can be fed into the music-making as a direct response. When I was taking a break from live playing, I played pre-existing tracks of my own recorded music. I had been asked to do this gallery opening a few months prior; the very next day, I left on my roadtrip to the Southwest and California.

For this gig, I played Chapman Stick with some simple effects processors, and two or three softsynths on my iPad, including the AniMoog app, an excellent synth app developed by the people who make the Moog Synthesizer. This is truly a great instrument, a professional-quality electronic music instrument—on your iPad! I ran the Stick through a looping device as well, although it's perfectly possible to play iPad and Stick at the same time, one hand each. I recorded both evening-long performances onto my laptop. I ran both iPad and Stick through my portable Mackie mixer, mixing them live to speakers in the room, and a stereo mix directly to the laptop. This was a great gig in which to try out the iPad as a concert instrument, and it performed wonderfully. For some future gigs, I fantasize showing up with my Stick and a backpack with my iPad and laptop, and maybe a foot-operated controller pedal or two—and that's all. A truly portable musician's performance rig.

After these gallery opening shows, I was on the road for over a month. Now that I'm back home, I finally had time to listen through the raw live recordings, to audition the musicscapes that I had made live. I've spent the last week or so going through the recordings from both nights. I've winnowed down several hours of live recordings to pick out some of the best moments, trimmed and edited them into individual tracks, and assembled them now into a short album. Just over 40 minutes of reasonably good performances. Remember that for a live gig there are almost always a few glitches or minor problems, and nothing is ever as perfectly-recorded as a studio album. That's also the joy of live music, its spontaneity and exploration.

I love playing completely improvised music, not knowing what will happen next, following my feelings, playing suspended in the air like a trapeze artist without a safety net. Things can go wrong, certainly, but when they go right, special moments are created.

I will eventually release this material as a live album, titled Opening Languages, probably when I get myself set up with the new music/composition website I am building at the moment. I intend to make the album available for sale on iTunes, and other venues. Meanwhile here is one track from this live improvised music, which you can audition here via streaming.

Opening Languages: i will not be sad in this world    

Arthur Durkee: Chapman Stick, effects, processing, iPad softsynths

Songwriting: Performance Milestones

This weekend just past I performed an original song, "The Power of Love," at a fundraiser Cabaret in Madison, a song I wrote last December, and revised somewhat while I was on my latest roadtrip. It was a personal performance milestone for me, because it was the first time that I've sung an original song while also playing Stick. Actually, the first time I've publicly sung and played at the same time. (You know, the usual post-folksong-revival singer-songwriter gig, where the singer/songwriter accompanies herself while singing. Usually on guitar; but I have no feel for guitar, have never learned to play it well, and never really sought to.)

For this Cabaret show I had piano accompaniment, so it was a fuller, richer sound for the song's instrumentation. It also gives me confidence to play with other musicians; I've always preferred ensemble to purely solo performances. The music I feel most confident performing, when in a purely solo setting, is improvised looping, which allows me to build layers of chords and melody over longer frames of time. For this singer/songwriter debut (I guess that's what it was!), it was very confidence-building for me to be able to perform with one other instrumentalist who knows how to improvise on chords from a lead sheet.

While I sang, I mostly played bass lines on Stick, a few treble chords, and simple bass patterns. I also managed to play a simple eight-bar solo after the bridge. We had two performances on consecutive nights; the second night I performed much better, didn't flub any notes or lyrics the way I had the first night. It's the sort of audience that would support you even during a train wreck, though, so it was a good, safe environment to try out a new performance skill, and build a little confidence around it.

I received several compliments about the song, and my performance—both because it was a new song written for the occasion, and a song unlike anything else on the variety-show program. Receiving compliments is Zen practice being about simple and graceful for receiving praise with neither false modesty nor self-denigration. One couple came up to me after the first night, and said that while I was performing, they were thinking of Neil Young: I took that as a major compliment, and was grateful for it. Some others said they really liked that I had done an original song; they also liked how I'd played, and (as often happens) were intrigued by the Stick.

Remember, as a performer you may know exactly where you performed imperfectly or made mistakes, but the audience usually will not. From their perspective, the performance is seamless and evocative, and the roughness may actually be part of the aesthetic. (Roughness and rawness are often part of the singer/songwriter aesthetic, in fact, where they are often seen positive qualities because they're authentic, not polished to an artificial diamond-hard sheen.)

At this point, I know a lot of more experienced musicians with lots of coffee-house gigs behind them will be thinking, Duh! But remember: what's old hat for you is still new for others. It's always good to remember we're not all alike, and more importantly, that it's never too late to try out venues or styles or performance modes that are new to you. You're never too old or experienced to carve new milestones for your personal roads.

I approached this performance mentally as though it was a poetry reading or open mic type of situation, which made it easier for introverted me to engage with an audience, even a supportive audience. I am actually pretty good at engaging with an audience, but it takes a lot out of me: I have to work up to it, psych myself up for it as it were, and it's tiring to be "on" for any significant length of time. After being "on" for an evening, coming home to the silent sanctuary of my own home is recharging.

I don't plan to run out and perform at local open mics all the time now. I'm a little past that point, careerwise. Nonetheless it's nice to know you can do it when you need to.

Some years ago, I believed very strongly that I was incapable of playing Stick (or bass or piano) and singing at the same time; I admired the musicians I saw doing that, but did not believe that I could do it, too. Now I have broken through, and done exactly that. Somewhere over the past few years of tribulation, turbulence, death and change, I acquired the self-confidence to break through that self-limiting idea. Actually, I know exactly where: It was during this past year of writing a major music commission, which basically has given me confidence to be a songwriter, combined with the attitude of: Who gives a shit, just do it, life's too short, and you almost died already, so take a risk, what have you got to lose. I am taking a lot more artistic risks in the wake of almost dying. Yet—while I could glibly chalk my attitude change up as another example of post-surgery life-changing alterations in my overall attitude—because this is about music, which is the artform I practice that is most closely connected to my heart and soul, it goes much deeper. It goes all the way down to my core, to my root self-image, to my Warrior self, to my self-confidence not just as an artist but as a person. This morning after the gigs, I feel a contentment, a self-confidence, a sense of accomplishment, that is both soothing and exhilarating. In simple words: I feel good.

Some other musicians will view this milestone as coming to me very late, compared to their own careers in performance and writing songs. They may have performed their first song while accompanying themselves very much earlier in life. But that's exactly my point in writing about this experience:

Personal milestones are individual.

They happen at different rates for different people. There is no one "usual" artistic career. There is no point at which you stop growing up, and become a stable, unchanging person or artist. (Stasis equals death.) There is no time at which you have "arrived," and don't have to continue to keep walking on your pilgrimage, keep walking towards the summit of your personal mountain. You don't have the luxury of coasting, you need to keep working. Artists don't retire, the way office workers do. You keep making art till you expire—I think most painters, for example, would be happy to die with the brush still wet in their hand. You keep going until the very end.

I have every intention of using this personal milestone experience to fuel more exploration, more artistic risk, and more reaching out past self-imposed limits that I once thought were permanent but have now become as insubstantial as mist. I don't know where the road will lead me next, but I do not doubt that it will contain more milestones.

Performance Empathy

There is a reason I like to play in ensembles, in musical groups, more often than I like to play as a solo artist. It's not that I don't play as a solo musician, but I do prefer working with at least one other musician. It's hard to articulate, but I ran across a good way of thinking about it in the liner notes to a recent CD:

Music is fondly called a universal "language." When we make music and listen to music together, the musical code necessary to this end usually seems self-evident. But how does such a code arise and proliferate? How does dialect or slang emerge from a language? What gives rise to characteristic phrasings, embellishments and rhythmic alloys shared by an entire group of musicians? And how do rules of style take hold? . . .

When five musicians play together, ten different paths of communication open up between them—a challenge to deft, accurate interaction and mutual attention. The only way to find and share these paths is with a large degree of empathy, which enables us intuitively to reflect our partners in ourselves, immediately and reflexively. In addition to criticism (the other form of constructive reflection), empathy is a key prerequisite for creative collaborations. It is a co-operative survival strategy, as old as time itself, and thus deeply rooted not only in our thought but in our bodies. That is what makes this gift so valuable and productive for our interaction. Joint phrasing, after all, cannot be captured in notation. It can only be gained through training and patience, through mutual respect and interest, through the ability to resonate with each other.

Then familiar phrases, curious and vivid turns of phrase, verbs of ghost notes and rhythmic punch lines will arise as if by themselves.
—Nik Brätsch, liner notes to album with group RONIN, Llyria

The reason I like to play in ensembles of like-minded, empathic musicians is that I'm addicted to making music the way that Nik Brätsch describes here. It's my favorite way of playing music, in groups of musicians who genuinely listen to and feel and respond with each other. It's almost magical at times, and one of the very best natural highs available. By comparison, many solo gigs, while they are rewarding in other ways, don't challenge me, don't push me as hard. In groups, I play better, I go further, I am challenged to be at the very edge of my game, and to spend as much time as possible "in the zone."

How did I get this way? Well, I can relate to the music that Nik Brätsch's group RONIN makes, and how they do it, and why, because I was for a long time in a very similar group.

I played for twelve years or so in an improvising band called Dangerous Odds with a core group of four musicians accompanying two core performance poets. We played more than one open mic poetry slam gig, and for several years had a monthly radiobroadcast on local community radio.

Dangerous Odds was based around the idea of spontaneously improvised music accompanying poetry performance. We built a specialty of being able to play in all styles of music, being able to change on the instant in response to the poets' words and directions. We never rehearsed, we just got together for gigs and recording sessions. We talked about what we were going to do before a gig, but at a recording session, sometimes we would just point at each other and say "Start something," the music would start, and the chief poet would pick a text that worked with what we were doing and join in. Often no key center was agreed on beforehand, we just dove in, and started playing in the Key Of X. A mood or concept might be agreed on beforehand, in response to a poem, and sometimes a key was chosen in advance. But not always. There were also times when the musicians would just play, without words or texts or poets. We tried to mix it all together for most live gigs.

When I say "all styles of music," I mean it. That includes classical and folk, as well as more typically improvisatory genres such as jazz, fusion, rock, and blues. For example, one evening we were joined by some Irish traditional musicians, and came up with Foggy Foggy Dub. On other occasions we came up with more experimental, soundscape-oriented music, occasionally quite unusual and minimal; for example, Clocks in Chaos. A lot of choices depended on the poem.

In this band I usually took the bass role in the ensemble, letting the flute and viola play melodic functions. I usually played either six-string bass guitar or Chapman Stick. Occasionally one of the poets would perform one of my own poems, too, while I played my musical role. For example, Begging Bowl. In later bands I took more of a melodic role, being a second "guitarist" even though I was playing Stick. For example, as with fUSE.

Dangerous Odds regularly invited guest musicians to sit in, and occasionally guest poets. We were very picky about who we invited, however. It had to be someone we liked, and got along well with. We had all been in bands in the past with overbearing front-row musicians (rock & roll guitarists being the most notorious Big Egos), and we made a point about equality amongst the musicians and poets. This was no one person's band. Our rule was, if you got us the gig, you got to say what you wanted to do; and we all set up various gigs at various times. So each of us was occasionally bandleader-for-one-gig, but not much more than that. As for guest artists, we usually asked them to give some direction as to what they wanted to do. Otherwise it was very equal, very give-and-take.

(Some more samples of pieces by Dangerous Odds can be heard on my Music page on my main website; just scroll down.)

We all learned to listen, to really listen to everything going on all the time, and to respond on the instant. The group became almost telepathic after awhile. Even if we hadn't played together for a month, there was rarely ever any hesitation. It all evolved quite naturally and intuitively. The enforced equality among all the musicians also led to mutual respect, which in turn improved our ability to listen to each other. Sometimes it took one song at the beginning of a recording session before we were all "tuned in" with each other again; but usually only one tune was needed, and for the rest of the night we were telepathic as usual.

As I mentioned earlier, we had all been burned by egotistical guitarists in previous bands; so we only rarely invited guitarists to sit in with us, and they had to be both great players and good friends. We were most often an entirely "guitar free zone." At one memorable gig, for one poem we used drums, keyboards, flute, poet, and three bass guitars. To have three bassists all going at the same time requires a lot of careful listening and respectful playing, and we made it work.

Getting back to the topic of musical empathy, playing for so long in Dangerous Odds spoiled me for playing in other kinds of bands. I got used to playing improvised music near-telepathically with other musicians. It's still my favorite way to make music: improvise together, without any road map, and without a safety net. Totally open and free. Most people, even most jazz musicians, think free jazz means cacophonous noise; but it doesn't have to mean that, it can mean subtle beauty, too. And I also like to improvise on a known pattern, or over a groove, or a set of chord changes. A little bit of structure can take you very far, as for example with 12-bar blues, possibly the most familiar and clichéd chord pattern around but still capable of infinite nuance and revitalizing freshness. It's all in how you approach it.

Spontaneous improvisation is still my favorite way to make music with other musicians. In Dangerous Odds I got addicted to playing with musicians with a high degree of empathy and intuition, and most importantly the ability to listen to each other.

I write composed, notated music, and I still play jazz, rock, the occasional blues, and folk gigs. I write songs to be sung, and I write them both for other people and myself to perform. I write concert music. I create soundscapes for art gallery openings. Even my notated music begins in ideas that all start out as natural improvisations. The music only becomes fixed as I begin to write it down. Even then, I like to leave some breathing room in a notated piece for the performers to be able to make some choices. I like indeterminacy.

Yet there remains something almost magically alive in spontaneously improvised music, where you don't know what's going to happen next, and you have to be alert and aware and Pay Attention at all times. Dangerous Odds spoiled me for more traditional jazz ensembles. I don't really like playing standards from the American Songbook, and so with a few rare exceptions I don't really know or regularly play any standards.

I'm attracted to the more avant-garde edges of improvised music. My favorite record label for over 30 years has been ECM. That is a label filled to the brim with this kind of music, host to many musicians who have influenced both my playing and my thinking. Some of my all-time favorite musicians are ECM recording artists. I still discover new artists through the label, because I trust their choices to be interesting to my ears.

Collaborative music is more thrilling to me than is solo music. As Nik Brätsch says, empathy is a key prerequisite for creative collaborations. I could not agree more. It is in fact, I would say, the central and most important key.

Darshan

Soon after I completed Heartlands, the large choral commission I've been working on of throughout most of 2011, I was commissioned to make a CD of music for meditation, yoga practice, Reiki sessions, and other healing work. A friend's mother had been using my CD Trance for some time, and had given it some praise, so I was commissioned to make a new CD as a gift. I worked on this project in my recording studio for about a month, and completed the CD just before Xmas 2011. It's entirely instrumental music, prominently featuring shakuhachi, and Tibetan and Japanese meditation bells.

This year I plan to finally figure out how to market more of my music online, including this new CD as well as some older CDs. Here's the title track as a taste of things to come:

Darshan    

—AD, shakuhachi, computer music instruments



The musical soundscape was created in part by using some music apps on my new iPad. I got the iPad after completing Heartlands. I can see that for me the iPad is going to be a fantastic creative tool, both for music and photography, and likely in ways I haven't even thought of yet. The other cool thing about the iPad is that finally computer design and technology is approaching what I've wanted for years, after becoming a Star Trek fan. Design follows art in the best way possible.

"Darshan" is a Sanskrit word that means "see" or "seeing." In Hindu usage it refers to beholding the gods, or God, directly, and can also refer to those annual festivals when images of the gods are taken out of the temples and paraded through the streets for all to see. There is an implication that what we see also sees us: a mystical truth not limited to Hinduism, but found in most mystical traditions. As the great Medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."

"Darshan" in Indian philosophy also is used to describe worldviews and mindsets, the distinctive in which a systematized philosophy looks at things, including its exegesis of sacred texts. Yoga itself is considered a darshan. Yoga is a form of kinesthetic meditation, after all, like walking meditation or the highest levels of some martial arts.

So, Darshan is about the seeing the divine, the encounter with the divine. One realizes in the encounter that one is not separate from the divine, but all are part of the One. And one realizes that one's actions are not other than the will of the divine, which after all is made of all beings and what they will.



The blessing of doing this smaller commissioned piece of music is that it filled the gap between the completion of the writing of Heartlands, and the beginning of the rehearsal process. I have learned, as never before, that I need to always have something to work on. And the past few weeks have been very stressful, even dire and desperate at times. Multiple stressors all came home to roost at the same time. (Including having to change my dietary regimen (again!) just before the winter holiday season. The good news is that the new, even more restrictive dietary regimen is in fact effective, and I have made real progress losing weight this past week or so, for the first time ever since the surgery last summer.)

The wisdom of artistic perseverance is to make sure you are always working on multiple projects, and that as soon as you finish one, you start another. Don't wait. Dive right in. Never leave a gap in between projects, because a gap between projects is the door by which depression and despair can enter. It's not about doing make-work to keep yourself preoccupied or distracted: this is real work, not make-work. It's about knowing that I stay more grounded and focused when I have a big creative project of some kind to occupy my attention. It's a way of channelling one's energy in the best way, and preventing those inner voices of panic and depression form gaining a toe-hold. It helps with being able to cope with the day-to-day.

Therefore, as I completed the Darshan CD, I began writing a new song, maybe to become a new set of songs, for myself to sing and play. One of these will probably get premiered at a fundraiser in March. The style is more loose and jazz-pop-rock than formal. I'm still working on the lyrics, but after several false starts, the pattern fell into place, and progress has been made. All I anticipate needing to notate finally is melody-and-words, with chord symbols for the chord changes. I'll write lead sheets, in other words, instead of fully realized charts.

Then I'll do my best to learn to sing the song and play Stick at the same time.

I feel like my Stick playing is revitalized, as I wrote about after seeing Tony Levin in concert a couple of months ago, which I felt gave me permission to go my own way as a player; even to play simply and cleanly, and not need to become another solo Stick artist who can play anything. I have my limits, and I'm okay with them. Practice is what it takes to stretch them, that's all.

Tony Levin on Stick

This past weekend I went to see a concert in Minneapolis, in a small, intimate club, of some of my favorite musicians on the planet. Stickmen, featuring Tony Levin, opened for the Adrian Belew Power Trio, and both groups joined forces for a third set of long and often brilliant covers of King Crimson songs. Which is only appropriate, since three of the people onstage were past and/or present members of King Crimson.

This the first major progressive rock concert I've been to in a few years—the last one was King Crimson, in St. Paul—and while I know I keep saying lately that since my surgery everything is new and for the first time, again i saw and heard things at this concert that sorted out my thinking as if for the first time.

I've seen Tony Levin play Chapman Stick many times before, live and via video, and each time I watch him play I learn something. It's like getting a lesson. There are so many ways he plays both Stick and bass that I find directly influential. This concert was no different. At the same time, it was validating and affirming as never before, for me, as a Stickist. I'll get to that a bit later. But first, a sidebar.

Within the Stick players' community, there's sometimes a strong pressure felt to be a solo artist: to play all the parts on your singular instrument. That's entirely possible, and there are great players who do just that. The seminars I've attended, along with many solo concerts, I've been quite impressed with some players, and musically uplifted by others.

But I like playing in a band, with other musicians. I like the give and take of live improvisation with others. I like playing bass in a band, and I like playing Stick to play the bassist role. I also like playing a "guitar solo" on Stick, which I did more often in an improvising prog rock band called ƒUSE I was involved with when living in California a few years ago. Doing a "guitar solo" on Stick makes you think in ways, and produce lines, that a guitarist might not.

The afternoon before the concert, I spent some hours with my musician partner in the duo Wind, Sand & Stars, Eddie Estrin, laying down tracks and elements and musical ideas. We hadn't played together for awhile, but the session was inspirational, and we've agreed to make music together more often again, starting soon. (Several previous WS&S sample tracks can be found on my website's Music page.) After jamming for awhile, we had a light meal, then went to see the concert together, along with another musician friend. At the show, I might add, we met several other musicians we knew.

One cardinal virtue of the Stick is that you are able, like on piano, to play all parts at the same time: melody, bass, and chords. The Stick is played with two-handed tapping technique, a technique pioneered by the Stick's inventor, Emmett Chapman. The technique came first, when Emmett was playing guitar; he invented the Stick in order to have an instrument with which to maximize the possibilities of his two-handed tapping technique. The Stick is set up for tapping, not strumming and plucking. It's not a guitar, and it's not really like a guitar. (So stop thinking like it is one.) Emmett is not a musician who performs, or lives, in a rut. He is one of the most original thinkers I've ever met, and enjoyed conversing with. I've said more than once that Emmett doesn't "think outside the box," for him it's more like, "There's a box?"

We all get into ruts sometimes. It's good to break out of ruts. But at root most ruts are conceptual, not actual.

One does meet Stickists who have a hard time getting out of their conceptual and motor-skills source or background boxes. It actually seems easier, based on observation, for a pianist to take up Stick than it is for a guitarist: the tapping technique is very pianistic (also very similar to how one plays small frame drums) in terms of motor skills. The fretboard theory required—in other words, learning where the notes are—is straightforward and logical, unlike the guitar's historical and idiosyncratic standard tuning (descended from oud, lute, and flamenco practice).

I never liked guitar precisely because I never liked its tuning, which on one level was designed to be easy and natural for chording but on another level requires contortions of the hand to get away from any music not tonal or chordal in nature. The players who tend to push that envelope are often players who use alternative tunings, including open tunings. At this point in life, learning guitar for me would be like learning to build a bridge: a long learning curve at the end of which I would only be competent at a skill in which others are demonstrably brilliant. Why invest the time in learning a skill that only makes you ordinary? I'd rather invest my study time in ways that find for me a voice unique and different, and notably my own.

I recognize and acknowledge there are great players on all instruments, and they are often inspirational to me as both a listener and musician. I've learned a lot about melodic form and improvisation from players on instruments other than my own. Honestly, I've learned less from my fellow Stick players than I have from two or three radical and brilliant guitarists (Julian Bream, Robert Fripp, Sonny Sharrock, to name a few guitarists in my very small pantheon), a few equally radical and brilliant bassists (Dave Allen, Charlie Haden, Bill Laswell, again to name only a few), and even from trumpet and trombone and saxophone players. Jazz phrasing isn't limited to voice or instrument: it's about feel, about timing, and the way you end a note or phrase that brings it life and dramatic intensity. It all begins and ends with the breath; even string players know to breath with their phrases. Breath is life.

And this leads me back, after a long sidebar, to my impressions of Tony Levin playing Stick at the concert the other night. What I mostly was reminded of is how powerfully he plays, the way he chooses his notes, the style of playing he does on Stick. A lot of two-handed bass playing. He's not trying to play the instrument as a soloist, and as a result in a band setting he does not overplay, he plays just the right amount of notes. When he plays a melodic solo, he often stays on the bass side of the instrument, using the upper ranges; this has a distinctly different tone color than simply moving over to the strings on the treble side of the instrument, and makes it sound more like a hyper-bass solo.

I watched and listened and—returning to my own everything is new perspective mentioned above—realized anew how strongly Tony Levin has influenced me as a Stick player. I play a lot more like Tony than I do any of the solo Stickists. I realized all over again how strongly he influenced me. After all, my route to this music was: first, I discovered the Stick; then I discovered Tony Levin; then I listened to the bands he was playing with, notably King Crimson and Peter Gabriel. That was my route to listening to King Crimson in a nutshell: because I was interested in Tony Levin.

So I feel pleased and validated and reassured that my Stick playing is just fine. It's in the Tony Levin vein, which is a very valid, mostly band-oriented rather than soloistic vein. That encourages me and affirms my commitment to playing Stick the way I want to play it. I have attended more than one Stick seminar where I left feeling like I was being told I lacked something, since I wasn't playing Stick like everyone else was, or wasn't playing enough solo stuff, or wasn't playing things inside the box. Where I didn't feel encouraged to play Stick the way I wanted to play it. Watching and listening to Tony play live again, and in a small club, close up, where I could see everything close up, was a validation that I'm doing just fine, thank you very much. I'm going my own direction with my music, and not playing like a lot of other guys play—which is another reason I like Stick, for its endless possibilities. While that's nothing new, sometimes you feel a little ostracized for being different.

I left the gig feeling very inspired and full of ideas. Days later, I still feel that way. I have ideas in my inner ear for a whole new set of Stick pieces. I've been wanting to start up the recording work again, maybe begin work on a new album, now that I've recovered enough from illness and surgery, and this concert inspires me to get busy right away. I've already laid down a couple of test tracks, one for an almost-Steve-Reichian piece, made using just Stick and delays. I hear a potential bass line mixing in; I can hear Tony playing it in my inner ear; the musical territory between Steve Reich and King Crimson is potentially convergent, after all. I'll see where I can go with these ideas soon.

But that's how I play Stick. Thanks to one of the greatest living bassists and Stickists I have ever seen and listened to: Tony Levin. My sincere gratitude.

Improvised Music Outdoors

I just got back home from a gig playing improvised music for a silent film. We were playing outdoors, at the pavilion at James Madison Park in Madions, WI. This is a park where you can watch the sunset over Picnic Point across Lake Mendota, and the water is always reflecting the mood of the sky in beautiful patterns.



I used to live near here, about two blocks from James Madison Park. This was my first apartment when I first moved to Madison in 1986. I would come down to the Park all year long, at all times of day and night. Coming down to watch the sunset was practically a neighborhood ritual. My best friend and I, who lived across the street from me for those same years, would go down to the water on hot humid summer midnights and skinny-dip off the rowing docks to cool off.



I love the way the light on Lake Mendota shimmers and moves from the vantage of this Park. It was one of the reasons I kept coming back down to the water, especially at sunset. In my back catalog of older photographs, I can identify this location as important to my development as a photographer. I have numerous photos that are abstracts of the colored light ripples on the water, with no other imagery; pure pattern, pure abstraction. I can recognize this in retrospect as a formative experience, a piece of self-training, for later photographic work.



The silent movie we improvised to, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), is a classic German Expressionist film. One of its interesting aspects is the set design and backgrounds, which are all distorted, non-rectilinear, and psychologically complex. It's interesting to realize the influence of Freudian thinking on this film, which is about murder, mesmerism, somnambulism, and other then-horrifying glimpses into the shadows of the unconscious mind.



I'm very happy with what we played. This was my first gig playing Stick since the recent surgery, and I wasn't sure about my endurance, my ability to haul gear around, and how the Stick would work with my ostomy bag in place. In fact, there was no problem. I had help hauling gear, setting up and tearing down, and the Stick's belthook and shoulder-strap configuration avoided the ostomy bag entirely. I did tape the bag to my skin so it would be out of my way for the gig, and I did have to watch out for cables. I just brought a couple of processors for effects, not my big rack. So it was minimal gear anyway. I played bass guitar for one scene, but most of the film was on Stick.

Four or five people came up to me afterwards to complement our group on the composed music for the silent film. They were astonished to be told that it was all spontaneously improvised. Most thought it had been pre-composed, rehearsed, and planned. In fact, there were no rehearsals, we just show up and play. With the right people, though, people who have played together before, and are good at listening, it's not difficult. This is in fact my favorite way to make music: just play. With the right people, it works.

This group of players tonight was the same that improvised music for Nosferatu last Hallowwen in Madison. (I'd also had fun making a poster for that gig.)

Much of the music tonight was in the groove, rhythmic, almost like aleatoric rock & roll, often quite hard-edged and psychologically intense. Which was great, because that really suited the mood of the film. Some of the audience comments I heard later said that they felt the music was perfectly matched to the music, perfectly applied, and therefore it must have been composed. That was why some of those commentors were surprised when they found out how we actually did it.

I felt part of a rhythm section again, me playing bass lines mostly on Stick, some on bass, with Geoff Brady playing really brilliant drum grooves. Playing like this makes me play better. It was a very satisfying gig. I was tired by the time I got home, and I needed to rest for a couple of days afterwards, but I got through it, and it felt good.

I managed to tape the performance with my little digital voice recorder. Actually I used two DVRs, and will at some point mix them together to maximize the recording quality and balance. Meanwhile here are a couple of short excerpts from two different chapters of the movie, from one of the DVR recordings.

Performance excerpts:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, excerpt 1    

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, excerpt 2    

Geoff Brady, drums, percussion, theremin
Arthur Durkee, Chapman Stick, bass guitar
Kia Karlen, french horn, percussion, small toy instruments
JoAnne Pow!ers, saxophones, flute, cornet

Location: Live at James Madison Park shelter, Madison, WI, August 28, 2011

Improvised Music from Live Loops

Despite some technical difficulties with my rack of music processing gear, last night I played some music that felt really good, really fulfilling.

I was playing incidental, background, and intermission music for a fundraising concert. It's an annual Cabaret put on as a fundraiser by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus at a club on Madison's west side. Dinner theatre, if you will, where the audience gets a meal and desert before and during the show. There is also a silent auction of items donated, the money made also going to the Chorus. This is an annual event, with a different and creative theme every year, in which members of the Chorus write the script, and prepare and perform musical solos, small group ensemble pieces, and skits. It's often quite hilarious. There's a lot of individual creativity that people tap into during the making of this show.

Because I was on the road all last month, I didn't have the capacity to pull together a music solo to perform onstage, so I volunteered to play incidental and ambient music before the show, and during the intermissions. I brought my Chapman Stick, my five-string electric bass guitar, and my rack of digital processors, including a Lexicon JamMan looping device:



I need to take part of the rack apart and make some changes to the cabling, and replace a couple of batteries. I haven't played out much this past year, between illness and lack of opportunity. This coming year I will be focusing mostly on writing music, which was one reason I bought a piano last fall. So the rack has been slightly neglected of late. I'll take it apart soon, and make those necessary repairs and changes, and then I want to start playing this way again. I may have to just bite the bullet and leave the rack set up in the living room next to the piano for awhile, so I can play and record as desired.



Last night, during the second intermission, using the looper to layer musical tracks together, I stumbled into a piece I felt really good about. I laid down a chord progression in the bass: eight bars of chord cycles. (The JamMan has 28 seconds of active memory, allowing you that amount of time in which to compose and record a loop.) Then I added some midrange melodic/chordal, which pulled the chord cycle in a new direction. Then I improvised a melodic solo over the top of this for awhile. Later, I added another set of midrange and treble chords that pulled the original bass line in yet another direction, harmonically. Then I added another melodic loop in the treble, which was the capping point of the harmonic cycle. I let that go for awhile, improvising around the various elements, then gradually let it fade away to nothing, while playing new chords and melodies over the top again. A gradual shift to another direction. The whole process-oriented, loop-based, improvised composition lasted between 7 and 10 minutes, the length of one of the show's intermissions. I was very pleased with the musical materials that had come up, and I really enjoyed playing this way, which I haven't done in far too long.

This is a fairly typical way of improvising/composing with loops, for me, as a performer and composer. It has its precedents. In classical music, there is a history in Medieval music of cyclic music based on repeating segments or fragments. In contemporary classical music, there is of course gradual-process music such as Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, for guitar—the guitarist records 10 tracks and plays the 11th track live with the recording. And there are precedents in pop music, as well.

Last month when I was on my latest roadtrip out West I found a couple of Mike Oldfield's recordings on CD at a regional CD store, notably Tubular Bells III. Oldfield is still most famous for his first recording, Tubular Bells, which broke new ground both in terms of its eclectic rock- and folk-based musical style, and its innovative use of the recording studio as part of the compositional process. The music is sectional in that recording, with each section built on layers of ostinati (repeating melodies) gradually being added together to make a contrapuntal texture. At the time of the original release of Tubular Bells, there was a lot talk in the critical circles about instrumental rock music; about music that presents itself without the usual developmental processes of classical and pop music, each section just stopping as the next section begins; about the absence of narrative pop music forms such as the ballad form, leading to comparisons with symphonic forms, for lack of other precedents; and a lot of commentary about the technical and craft aspects of the music, which were (and are) impressive. Basically, Oldfield used the recording studio to play almost every instrumental part himself. Each part was played live to tape, gradually adding layers to construct the piece. This process of layered composition is directly analogous to contemporary loop-based composition and performance.

In my opinion, Oldfield's masterpiece from his early period of making recordings this way is Ommadawn, which is his third recording, and in which he takes everything learned so far and pushes it to a new, very much orchestral level. A lot of musicians get stuck on the technical brilliance of what Oldfield did (and does), which was admittedly very ground-breaking and influential. Many musicians, like many poets, get stuck on the technical brilliance of the craft, however, and neglect the musicality the craft exists to support. There are still rock musicians who imitate what Oldfield has done, but without the same level of musical inspiration.

Oldfield's ostinato-based compositional style, consisting of layers of repeating cycles of melody and chords, is very much a precursor to contemporary digital loop-based music. Just as much as Steve Reich's music is a precursor. I dare say Tubular Bells remains one of the most famous pieces of music of the past half-century, instantly recognizable to the ear, and made even more famous by its use as the soundtrack to the original film The Exorcist. (I could quibble about the music's use or misuse in the film, but that's a discussion for another day. Suffice to say, the music has way more going on, as music, than the movie ever allowed for or revealed.)

I wasn't able to make a satisfactory recording of what I improvised last night. It was music live in the moment. However, while it's still fresh in my mind, I plan to record a sketch version of it this week, once I've done a few other chores, and set up the rack again here at home. It's a sketch that I might be able to work into an actual composed piece of music, later on.

Composition for me is often based on improvisation, after all. I regularly improvise till I find something I like, then make that into a finished, composed piece. It's one way of working that has led to some good results.

For example, here is another loop-based improvisation recorded direct to stereo, performed live on Chapman Stick, which has evolved into being a finished piece. The process of improvising/composing and layering loops, chords, and melodies here is essentially similar (albeit the music itself with very different elements, tempo, and style) to that of the new piece from last night that I described above:

Twenty Minutes Short of a Year    

AD, Chapman Stick, loops

Ambient Podcast Broadcast

There's an ongoing Spacemusic podcast out of the Netherlands, hosted by TC from Rotterdam. (An eccentric radio announcer if every there was one, but with good taste in ambient music, trance, and techno, and their related genres.) I've been listening to Spacemusic for years.

On the Spacemusic webpage, scroll down a bit to the episode titled 07 Jun 10 Coffee Break: 64-bit podcast. You can download or listen via from there, or subscribe and download via iTunes.

The last track on this podcast episode, starting just after 59 minutes, and about 8 minutes long, features Tony Kapela playing mostly bass guitar (and processing), and myself playing Chapman Stick. You'll hear some recognizable Stick sounds in there, but mostly it's very floaty-ambient, which is very appropriate for this Spacemusic program. I was very pleased to be part of this. (Actually, although I've listened to Spacemusic for years, I didn't know Tony had finished and submitted this track till I heard the show. Surprise!) TC seemed to think those were guitar sounds, but htey're actually made on Stick.

Ambient Stick marches on!

Music I Still Dream Of

My artistic roots lie more in music than in any other art or medium. I am very tied to sonic experience: I am unable to "tune out" annoying sounds by ignoring them, the way most folk claim they can. I'm very aware of environmental sounds, and I like lots of silence. The mindless TV chatter on all day in the next room will drive me to violence, eventually. I don't know if my hypersensitivity makes we unusual, or just more than usually aware of my surroundings (it seems to me lots of people tune out to everything, not just their musical environments, but to their whole lives). My musical roots lie in the avant-garde and the experimental. I still get a charge out of hearing something unique that I haven't encountered before.

I was browsing over at Mode Records earlier, after feeling like looking up one of my compositional mentors, George Cacioppo. George was a man I knew from my music school days in Ann Arbor, MI. I knew who he was before I ever met him: one of the founders of the ONCE Group, one of the composers whose work bridged the gap between composers interested in traditional form and melody, and composers interested purely in sound. He was interested in small, quiet sounds, and his works are often mysterious, have unusual sonic palettes, and feature poetic, even mystical titles. A piece I remember being very profoundly compelled by is Moves Upon Silence, for two amplified cymbals and small chamber orchestra.

George's day gig was over at the University of Michigan radio station, WUOM-FM, where he was an engineer, producer, programmer, and host of a weekly half-hour new music program. George occasionally taught composition students, and I got to know him when he took over the composition students' seminar for a semester at the School of Music, where I majored in composition. We became friends, and I got to know him pretty well, even after class was over. He had a real joy of throwing ideas up in the air for discussion, the more bizarre the better; he would toss something out, then sit back and watch the fireworks with a twinkle in his eye and an almost-but-not-quite-repressed grin. He had a truly wicked sense of humor.

Some time later, I performed in a concert retrospective of George's music at Rackham Auditorium in Ann Arbor; I was part of a mass performance of his seminal piece Cassiopeia, led by William Albright, my advisor and another mentor, with musicians scattered throughout the hall. I mostly played vibraphone for that event. A tape piece of mine, elegy for George, was played at the memorial service and concert held in his honor, after his sudden death in 1984. Other composers on the bill included Gordon Mumma, Donald Scavarda and Robert Ashley. I recall having a long conversation with Gordon Mumma in the lobby, a talk ranging across experimental music and ethnomusicology alike, which were shared interests.

When I heard George had died, I was in the production studios of WCBN-FM in Ann Arbor, the campus student station. Don't look down your nose at "campus student station." WCBN was efectively a county-wide community station airing music no one else did, and was very highly regarded. I was a volunteer programmer and producer for several programs, ranging from extended sonic pieces composed for radio, to new music and world-music shows aired every Sunday. It was in April of 1984, and I was working on recording some solo piano pieces on the old beatup upright in the recording studios. A friend and fellow programmer was acting as engineer on that occasion. We were both shocked and saddened at the news. I recorded a piano track, then ran the tape (yes, we actually used reel to reel tape in those days), backwards, and recorded voice and flute tracks using long tape-echo delays and reverbs. The resulting piece was elegy for George. I found out later that George had been re-reading T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets at the time of his death—at the exact same time I had also been re-reading the same poems. They were his favorite poems; they were, and are, my favorite Eliot poems. The synchronicity has always given me a chill. I had the Quartets in mind when I recorded my elegy, as well; someday I will get around to that string quartet inspired by them, that I've been meaning to get around to for 15 or 20 years.

Much of George Cacioppo's music is very quiet, very sparse, and moves slowly in a world of whispers and gentle sounds. Events happen with long spaces in between them, giving each sound time to be itself. George talked more than once about respecting sound and silence: as though each sound needed to be fully heard, fully explored—fully honored—before we could move on to the next sound.

Between this influence, and the influence of John Cage on my work in the form of indeterminacy, I often find myself listening in the way that George taught us to listen: to the tiniest thing as though our lives depended on it. He taught me to pay attention to the smallest aspects of sound, even as he also used indeterminate aspects in his music notation for pieces such as Cassiopeia, which has small determined note-clusters connected by lines and curves. One proceeds from node to node along the lines, staying connected at all times. There is in the score also dense section of drawing that has no obvious notes—George called it the "brain" in the score, mostly because it looked like one—but is a dense web of lines that the performer may follow more freely. George, as much as Cage, taught me to make my musical scores look visually beautiful, as well. (My mother once took a page of one of my scores, framed it, and mounted it on the wall near the piano in my parents' home, where it stayed for some years.) Playing Cassiopeia, always very quietly, taught mme lessons about connection and contemplation. It was a most meditative music, and was one of the foundations of my own composition and performance practice, which to this day I view as spiritual, meditative, disciplines practice.

It's been a day for thinking about music. I recently completed a dark-ambient piece for a new CD I'm working on, a "spacemusic" CD, based on one of my favorite pieces of music from all time and space, John Dowland's part-song Flow, My Tears. It's a piece I've sung and played for years, the showpiece of Dowland's mournful, Elizabethan blues music. Roots in the blues in the 16 th century. I've arranged the piece for male chorus, and it's been performed a couple of times. Here's this new version, titled Lachrimae Pavan.

In the years since graduating from the School of Music, I've been down several rocky roads—abandoning Western music in favor of Javanese gamelan for some time, making a living as a graphic artist and typographer, then not, returning to music renewed, learning to improvise, developing my skills as a performer on Chapman Stick, and much more—but music remains my root artform and medium. (Poetry is a distant third, after visual art. I happen to be good at all of these artistic mediums, though, so even if I rate poetry as third on my list of practicing artforms, others think highly enough of what I write to want to publish it on occasion, for which I am always very most grateful.)

The major difference between Now (making my living as a creative professional, covering a wide spectrum of different skills) and Then (being a music student and serious composer of new music) is that, Now, I rarely notate scores anymore: instead, I record them. They are still notated, on occasion, but more like graphic notations than traditional scores. I think in terms of layers, shapes, gestures, forms, not in terms of harmony, counterpoint, and melody; the only Western element of music I still regularly employ is melody. I record a lot of what I do directly onto one or another of my computers, both of which are set up as creative stations for studio music recording, art creation and editing, photography, web design, and typography. (I have a Windows tower that is the main studio computer, and Mac laptop that travels with me wherever I go; most of my Black Dragon podcast has been recorded and mastered on the laptop.) I also use software to create new pieces purely on the computer; computer-music techniques that I regularly employ range from cut-and-paste to granular synthesis, with a full range of processing.

For the past several years, I have become more and more involved in playing Stick in groups that emphasize purely improvised music. We call it improv, we call it spontaneous music, we call it music improvised in all styles. Various groups and bands I've been in play to accompany poetry performance, to accompany silent film, at art gallery openings (I once sat and generated sound in a room full of pop art at the Weisman Gallery in Minneapolis; it was a great experience to be playing improv soundscape in a room full of Warhols, Rauschenbergs, and others), at festivals and art fairs, sound showcases, and avant-garde music reviews. Most of the music I perform in public, Now, is spontaneous music, then: unrehearsed, unplanned, unprogrammed, yet coherent. With the right group of players, who listen well to each other, it sounds composed: the paradox, of course, is that improvisation is spontaneous composition.

I've learned many lessons over the years, playing/composing in these situations. So, here is an idiosyncratic list of tips and tricks for playing live music in public settings, a list of practices that works for me, although they might not work for anyone else (or they might):

Don't try to do too much, too soon. There's always a next time.

Ignore every input that doesn't serve the music. If I have to tune out the crowd, and just pay attention to what I'm doing, that's okay. The crowd will (probably) still be there when I'm done. If I go on a journey, they'll come along for the ride.

State of mind matters.

Distractions are not really there. You don't even have to acknowledge them.

There's a spiritual and emotional aspect to live playing that they don't teach you in music school. It's possible to turn even a cover band gig at a noisy biker bar into a kind of prayer. (Prayer is nothing else than connection.)

Meditation helps, before, during, and after.

Eat after the gig, not before, unless it's at least an hour and a half before. Same rules as for swimming. A full belly slows down the brain.

Listen. Listen. Listen.

Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention.

If your mind wanders, bring it back without anger or judgment. Hey, I lost my focus for a moment. Oops. So, what's next.

Forget about perfection. Nothing is ever perfect, ever, not in this world. Striving for near-perfection is the best we can do—the path is the goal—but we'll eventually fail at even that, so just accept it and get over it. No matter what you do, something will always go wrong. Every gig has a technical problem of some sort or another. The secret to a calm mind is to find them before they find you.

Use nervousness and stage fright, if you experience them, as tools to keep your edge: harness whatever you're feeling, and direct it into your playing. Your mood might be affected by the room's mood, but as long as you're onstage, you have the ability to make the room's mood follow your mood, too. Keeping your edge means balancing on the edge of the knife: falling into neither despair nor complacency.

Emotion = energy + motion. Emotion is energy in motion. Don't stop for anything. Turn on a dime. Keep moving.

Turn your mistakes into riffs. "Play a mistake three times, it becomes an idea." (Thanks to Miles Davis.)

Follow where the music wants to lead. Ride the horse, but let it have its head on the riskier parts of the trail.

Forget everything technique you've ever learned, and go for Feel. Forget what you Know, or think you know, and just get into the flow.

The music knows more than you do. Your fingers know more than you do, too.

Don't pretend to know what you're going to do next: you might have an intention, but it's only an intention. Change plans to suite the moment. Never be afraid to throw everything away. Never be afraid to be naked and empty. Don't hide behind your technique. Don't be afraid to be vulnerable, and open to surprise.

Audience noise is part of the music.

"Remember those quiet evenings." —from the Oblique Strategies

The rules of swordsmanship are the same as the rules of musicianship. If you think about it too hard, you tie yourself in knots, you lose.

One of my Ki Aikido teachers said, "When you approach the practice mat, after you bow, say to yourself: This is my mat. I own this mat." I do the same thing, when I go onstage, as when I approach the mat. The stage is the mat, and the mat is life. The bow is also important.

The two best things I ever did for myself as a performing musician were to study drumming, and to study martial arts. Studying drumming got my time into shape. Studying martial arts got my attitude into shape.

Whatever tool works to keep you focused and centered, that's a good tool to use.

Looking back on the several directions my musical life has taken, since I first wrote and performed new music, back in Ann Arbor, I wonder, I do wonder: perhaps these are rules for living, not just for performing.