Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me

Ten albums that have influenced me (I'm cheating a bit as some artists have more than one album listed, and in some cases their entire body of work has influenced me):

1. Wendy (née Walter) Carlos: Switched-On Bach. Either the first or second LP I ever bought. Wore out at least two copies over the years, maybe three. First, here are modern electronic instruments playing some favorite classical music, proving that it works. Second, this was my introduction to the possibilities of the Moog synth. (I own two at this point.)

2. Bill Laswell: Hear No Evil. Laswell has always done really interesting kinds of music, often ten years ahead of everyone else. HNE is a fusion of hard urban grooves with Americana, West African and Indian rhythms, and Beat sensibility. This is one of my main influences when I pay improvised rock, prog, and jazz. Laswell proved that you can put a dub bassline on almost any kind of improvised music and make it solid. There are several other Laswell albums I could have listed here, yet this is one I keep coming back to again.

3. King Crimson: Discipline. Like so many others, Tony Levin was who influenced me to play Stick. This is just a great and enduring album, light and dark by turns, proving to me that "math rock" at its best is gutsy and emotional, not just cerebral. "The Sheltering Sky" contains a flavor of emotional intensity I had only ever heard before in composers like Bartok, Ligeti, Gorecki, or Grieg.

4. Javanese Court Gamelan, Vol. II: Istana Mangkunegaran (Nonesuch Explorer Series). The whole Nonesuch Explorer Series was very influential on my life, opening the door to world music (long before worldbeat was a pop music genre), and eventually to studying ethnomusicology. This album, from the Mangkunegaran influenced me not only musically but personally: eventually I traveled to Indonesia on a Fulbright and studied gamelan at the Mangkunegaran itself, playing some of the music on this album on those same instruments. For me that was a numinous, thrilling, amazing, near-religious experience. I devoted many years of my life to playing and studying Javanese gamelan, and it affected the way I play improvised music, too.

My immersion in gamelan and world music completely changed how I think about music and music-making. Gamelan was part of my immersion in pattern music: music based on ostinatos, on repeating patterns, on additive rhythm, on gradual process. The next three albums are also part of that experimentation with that kind of music, each from a different direction: jazz, rock, classical.

5. John Klemmer: Touch. Before late high school I had had no interest in jazz, rock, pop, or anything but classical and avant-garde music. This LP got me into jazz because the music was ostinato-based themes treated as jazz heads. I still find it really appealing, as well as still being outside the jazz mainstream. From here, all of jazz opened its doors to me, although I remain most strongly drawn to the jazz avant-garde, the more "outside" music like "free jazz" or the composed complexity of Ellington. And I could also list Brubeck's "Time Out" as a key influence here, too.

6. Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells, Hergist Ridge, and Ommadawn. I remember having an argument in the van on a free afternoon when I was studying geology in Wyoming, when a bunch of us college students were stuffed in the van listening to the Jackson radio station. "Theme from The Exorcist" came on, and everybody was into the music, but nobody but me knew it was excerpts from Tubular Bells. Oldfield built layers of melody and harmony over gradually built-up musical patterns. All three of his early album-length recordings were influential on me, but Ommadawn is in my opinion one of the greatest works of the 20th Century. People don't realize how much folk music influenced Oldfield, and as an ethnomusicologist I can hear that influence all through here.

7. Steve Reich: Drumming (DGG 3 LP set) and Music for 18 Musicians. Gradual process music, which is actually the opposite of "minimalism," a term Reich has never liked. Small repeating musical patterns change gradually, and expand and contract, creating layers of interacting sound. This music influenced me as a composer, certainly, as well as a listener. Music for 18 Musicians is one of the greatest works of classical 20th Century music; and this is proved in part because it is now being played by talented high school groups, too.

8. John Cage. I've always listened to lots of classical avant-garde music, or "experimental" music. I can't pick a particular Cage recording that was a major influence, because his entire body of work has been a major influence on me. Maybe I could single out on the LPs of the Variations. I've performed a lot of Cage over the years, as well. Probably the 2 LP set of Indeterminacy (Folkways) is what I would have to single out as an important influence, as it combined music, "noise," and words together. This led me towards text-sound poetry, which of course had a lot to do with, which is the use of the spoken word as a musical element.

9. David Munrow and The Early Music Consort of London: Music of the Middle Ages and The Six Wives of Henry the VIIIth. Munrow was one of the leading lights of the Early Music revival scene in the 1970s, which was a both scholarly and popular revival of Medieval and Renaissance music performance on original instruments, that continues to this day. Munrow's 3 LP set of Medieval music was my first introduction to the very modern-sounding music of the 13th and 14th Centuries, which still sound avant-garde. This was my first intro to Perotin, the great composer of organum. And Munrow also did the soundtrack, period music on period instruments, for the hit BBC TV series about Henry the VIIIth, which my family avidly watched together as it was first broadcast on PBS. Medieval studies has had almost as big an impact in my life as has ethnomusicology, and in similar ways. Munrow was who opened that door for me.

10. Joni Mitchell: Hejira. There have been a lot of singer-songwriters of the "folk revival" who have had a big impact on me as a songwriter, but Joni Mitchell towers over all of them. This is not only an album full of great songs, it's also musically adventurous and was ahead of its time. Mitchell took a lot of flak for always evolving her sound, rather than staying the little waif with singing autobiographical songs about love, and jazz was a huge influence on her, culminating at one point with Mingus. It's all there in Hejira, though, combined with the appeal of being a musical road trip full of vivid characters and scenes. Some of the songs on "Hejira" have not only influenced me as a songwriter, they have at times seemed to be the narrative of my own life.

Songwriting: Is Listening

Yesterday someone gave me the 1949 edition of The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein, a nicely-printed hardbound book which will go on the shelf by the piano in the living room, next to the two volumes of collected lyrics by Oscar's most famous student, Stephen Sondheim. Oscar's presence is found woven throughout Sondheim's commentaries on his own lyrics. Skimming through the book I found many familiar song lyrics, but also many I didn't know so well, which I was able to read on the page as though they were poems, and appreciate them as such.

This was a pleasant, rare experience, for me, since songwriting is words-and-music, and the two are usually so inextricably twined that you can't separate them. Even though many poets are biased towards words alone, and even though many fans claim to enjoy reading songs by their favorite singers as poems (the Cults of Dylan and Cohen are particularly prone to this), in truth it's almost impossible to read song lyrics on a page without hearing the melody in your mind, especially with songs you know well. Songwriting is a synergistic artform, not a purely literary one: words-and-music together are a greater whole, most of the time, than they are separately; in truth, most song lyrics, if presented on the page purely as poetry, are often limp and banal.

So it was pleasant to encounter Oscar's more unfamiliar, to me, lyrics, and be able to in fact read them as poetry. And I have to say, everything good that people have said about Oscar's skill and craft in writing lyrics, held true in my casual reading through this book of collected lyrics.

As I look more deeply into songwriting as a means of artistic expression, as I embrace it more as a mode of music composition, as I accept the fact that I've always been writing songs even if I didn't label the activity as such, I find myself doing more and more listening, as a songwriter, to songs written by a wide range of others, in a diverse range of modes and styles. In my occasional browsing through local thrift stores, I allow myself to pick up CDs by singer-songwriters that I might have ignored before, to see what I can learn from them. I listen to a lot of these CDs in the truck, and I do make remix CDs and playlists in iTunes of newly-discovered favorite tracks, so I can listen more closely, again mostly while driving. I find myself giving a lot more attention to Nashville than I ever imagined I ever would, if only because Nashville as a recording haven is more diverse than most people think it is.

I have subscribed to American Songwriter magazine and so far have found it to be a wealth of useful information, reviewing, and especially thoughtful interviews. Within the past year they've done a special Country issue, an overview of contemporary country trends and artists that had a sense of history behind it; they've done a Bob Dylan 50th year career assessment and overview; and there's been a profound interview with Paul Simon. I like the magazine's iPad app, which adds multimedia layers to reading the articles, including lots of videos and audio tracks, extra sidebars to interviews, and so forth. So far, my experience of this magazine has been that it's an essential resource for any songwriter. It also makes me want to go back to reading classic folk/roots music periodicals like Sing Out!

I now listen to a lot of music that these days is labeled as Americana, which encompasses styles that are home-grown rural and regional in origin, often from here in the Heartlands that bicoastal urban types fly over and ignore. Music that actually has a pretty broad range to it, and can encompass styles ranging from folk, blues, classic country, introspective balladry, and bluegrass, to swamp rock, zydeco, Missouri jazz, Appalachian fiddling, and more. What these musics all have in common is sincerity of origin and history, depth and longevity of tradition, and an appreciation for honesty and authenticity. Many have stories to tell of ordinary people living life as best they can even when life is hardscrabble and unexalted. There is no "bling" here, no lapidary exaltation of the surface of life, no emphasis on the ephemeral at the expense of what has endured.

A lot of contemporary country music artists talk about "traditional values" and "family values," but the best of these artists, people like Willy Nelson, include a lot of diversity and acceptance under the banner of "tradition" and "family." Tradition means you are not ignorant of your own history, nor trying to rewrite it to your personal gain. Family means you love the people in your life, even if sometimes you think they're full of crap.

Some of this is music that I've always listened to and been involved in, although I haven't overtly tried to craft my own songs within its styles. Folk music, old-style country, roots music, singer-songwriter material, and some interesting hybridized music that years ago I had to come up with a name for, which I called new traditions music: music that is brand new yet rooted in tradition, syncretizing existing folk traditions with the exploratory spirit of the avant-garde.

There are certain record labels that I've long known were trustworthy for finding and presenting quality songwriting. I now find myself listening to many artists new to me, just because they're on these labels. Several of these labels, by no coincidence, have long been prominent in the folk music and songwriter recording worlds, and are well-known to anyone interested in that music: record labels that are too big to be dismissed as mere "niche" labels, but small enough to remain independent and not subject to the vagaries of pop music fashion. Rounder, Philo, Folk-Legacy, Flying Fish, Nonesuch.

The latter, Nonesuch, has been since the 1970s a label that has brought to the eager listener many folk and world music recordings not otherwise commercially available; the Nonesuch Explorer series was produced, recorded, and written by actual ethnographic scholars and ethnomusicologists; as I go through my old vinyl LPs in the basement I discover that I still have most of these releases. I've listened to some of those recordings so often that for me they are as indelible in my youthful memory as rock 'n roll is for others. I am as familiar with Paul Berliner's album of Shona mbira recordings, and Robert Brown's several recordings of Central Javanese gamelan, as some of my friends are with Led Zeppelin. The formative influences on the young musician were about the same, although the sources diverged radically. I can hear many subtle influences in my own composed music that others might not be aware of, that are rooted in the world music I listened to in my formative years; one example is that I felt I was given permission to not write linear-narrative tonal programmatic music, but in modes and cycles instead. A very different approach to using music theory in practice. I know a lot of musicians who began in garage bands, imitating the music they were listening to on the radio and on their LPs; in truth I did the same, only the LPs I listened to were quite different.

So I find myself picking up and listening to a lot of singer-songwriters in the thrift stores that I overlooked before. This is part of my education as a songwriter. I'm not learning by directly imitating what I hear—I have too much experience as a composer and poet now to absorb influence so blatantly anymore—but rather by immersion in subject matter, mood, performance style, tone of voice, and the subtleties of arranging. I am discovering songs and songwriters that are incredibly good, and learning from all of them. Again, the range is diverse.

New to me is Tab Benoit's swamp blues style, but it's fantastic and gutsy. New to me is songwriter's songwriter Ellis Paul. My sister introduced me last year to Shania Twain's great feminist anti-love songs, and more. I am rediscovering folk humorist Christine Lavin, having found a few of her live albums. Nickel Creek. Alison Krauss and her various groups and collaborators. Carrie Newcomer.

And of course I go back and listen to those songwriters and folk musicians who I have listened to for many years: Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Gordon Bok, Michael Smith, Lynn Miles, Carol Noonan, and more. There are many contemporary women songwriters who owe such a huge debt to Mitchell that, despite their various and divergent styles and means, I think can seriously be called The Daughters of Joni Mitchell. One of the best of these is Sarah Mclachlan, and she passes on the torch with the regular Lilith Fair women's music festivals that she organizes and headlines, including the live recording CDs that follow.

Michael Smith, from Chicago, is another songwriter's songwriter, who I've listened to for years: everybody knows or has done his songs, but he himself isn't that well known; Claudia Schmidt's recordings of "The Dutchman" and "Vampire" are still better known that his own versions. Yet his albums on Flying Fish are essential, as no one else writes or plays or sings quite the way he does. His song "Panther in Michigan," based on a true story of a live black panther than roamed free for an entire year in southeastern Michigan, which I remember because I was living in Ann Arbor at the time, is a particularly fine example of topical balladry that transcends the form and becomes timeless.

I also go back and listen to singers and songwriters who I knew about, but now look at more carefully and attentively, with deeper appreciation, and deepening respect. Kris Kristofferson, Patsy Cline, Greg Brown, k.d. lang, Jane Siberry, John Mellencamp. Essential blues artists like Bessie Smith. And I have a lot of vinyl LPs in my basement that I am going through and rediscovering, including many that I'm digitizing to be able to listen to again since as far as I know those albums never were re-released on CD.

There are also a number of roots and blues and soul/R&B and rock 'n roll artists that I've been going back and listening to as part of this cycle of absorbing and learning, appreciating them more as singers and songwriters, many of whom I overlooked back when they were very often in the Top 40, but when I still mostly listening to anything but the Top 40. Or who I knew one or two songs by, but now have been listening to their whole catalog, to learn from them regarding the craft of songwriting. My respect for Tom Petty has gone way up in the past few years, for example, although I thought all along that he was an innovator and explorer in several ways. Rediscovering Robert Palmer has been fun, because of his sheer joy in life and music. Bruce Springsteen I've written about at length, elsewhere, in regards to the folk-sourced aspects of his music.

The list, and the listening, goes on.

My appreciation for the craft of playing guitar while singing is also on the ascendant. I'm learning from listening to singer-songwriters who play and sing guitar at the same time. What I'm learning is tricks of performance and presentation, as well as the formal craft of how to write an effective song as simply and minimally as possible.

Not that I have any interest in learning to play guitar as well as many songwriters do. (Bruce Cockburn and Bonnie Raitt continue to be underrated as guitarists, which surprises me, although it must be admitted that their often elegant guitar work is always in the service of the song, and not shown off for its own sake.) I do have an adequate guitar now, and have been teaching myself to play it, but in truth I've avoided guitar for most of my life precisely because it's the instrument everyone and their grandmother plays. I started at age 6 on piano, and also play many other instruments, but guitar I avoided out of an almost perverse desire to be different. No, that's not quite accurate. To be completely honest, and more accurate in retrospect, deep down inside I always knew that I was different, anyway, and no amount of trying to conform to the norm was going to change that; I tired and failed throughout my youth to "fit in" and I never did. So I gave up trying to fit in musically and socially while still relatively young (although in terms of career and finance I gave up trying to fit in much later in life). For one thing, the stereotypical teenage male notion of joining a band to "get some girls" that I saw many young kids take up guitar to get into did not appeal to me at all—since I was more into getting boys than girls. Yes, we're talking about knowing about that difference about yourself, and it did indeed affect some musical decisions as well as other life-choices.

Anyway, now I have an adequate guitar, and I am learning how to make musical sounds on it, but mostly for studio recording rather than performance. I also don't tune my guitar in any standard way, but use open tunings that ring out sonorously. Something I learned from musicians as diverse as John Renbourne, Robert Fripp, and (again) Joni Mitchell, all of whom have championed non-standard tunings. (And again another way in which I was attracted to music-making that was different, in part because of my other differences.)

Meanwhile, I've crossed off the checklist the songwriter's inevitable first time playing and singing live in front of a coffeehouse crowd: I sang a new song I wrote at a cabaret event a few months ago, while also playing Stick. So, we're making progress.

My point in this discursive ramble has been simple, however: To be a songwriter, you need to listen to a lot of songwriting, and that's what I've been doing. It's the same reason that writers need to read, read, read, and read some more; poets especially, perhaps, although novelists are not excused from the task of reading. You learn much more by example and observation, and then trying things out for yourself, than you ever do in the classroom. There's a reason most authentic singer-songwriters are still mostly self-taught—which is not to say that they are ignorant of music theory or craft or technique—and that's because learning by doing is a richer way to learn than sitting and listening to a lecturer expound. And that's why I'm listening to so much music that is relatively new to me—new folk, Americana, roots, and the all the rest: I am educating myself to become a better songwriter. This is journeyman work, and I relish it.

The Popular Pack & the Conservative Ear

Someone recently, in a listening session devoted to choosing between five composers for a new musical commission, labeled my music as "modern." I don't take this is a slight, although the speaker partly intended his remark as such. As I was reminded later by a musician colleague, "modern" like "experimental" is often used pejoratively by the musically untrained. The untrained ear likes the familiar, not the challenging. Untrained listeners like pop songs because the words carry meaning, regardless of the quality of the music or the execution of its performance.

Let's face it, your average rock star is a Dionysian performer, taking on the god's aspect of revelry and rule-breaking onstage and off, but only rarely does a rock star have the musical skills of a trained musician. Music school was an Apollonian environment; playing in jazz, rock and punk bands later, for me, was comparatively Dionysian. As a composer, I often seek to balance the two gods and their aspects. The point is, you need both gods in dynamic balance to make genuine, authentic music.

In this same listening session, I was surprised and dismayed at the works presented by the other four composers. My dismay was not caused by any lack of quality, as each was a skilled, accomplished composer. What dismayed me was that every piece by a given composer sounded alike: the same basic style, the same basic treatment of materials, the same basic tempi and harmonies and chord progressions. And everything was in 4/4 meter. The sameness to each piece by more than one composer made one wonder where one piece ended and another began. As if each piece were a single variation on the composer's deeper theme; as though each piece were a fresh attempt to climb the same mountain.

And there was also a certain deeper-level sameness of style between all these composers. Perhaps there was a self-selection process going on that led to a certain sameness in samples chosen to be presented on this occasion, that led to this veneer of identical cabinetry. Nonetheless there was an overall blandness and stylistic cohesion. Each composer seemed to represent a variation on a deeper, perhaps subconscious, theme. I suppose this is what has made each of these composers popular and gotten them commissions: they are unthreatening to either performers or listeners, their music not too hard to execute, not very challenging to listen to. I suppose that a certain blandness has always led to popularity. In this instance, it also led to conformity.

As my musician colleague expressed it later, the reason my pieces were pejoratively labeled "modern" was only partly because I sometimes employ 20th century musical vocabulary rather than 19th century. The other, deeper reason was simply that my compositions stood out from the pack as, well, different. (Which was completely unintentional on my part.)

Thus one wonders if there isn't a deadening of creativity going on in new music these days, just as there has been in poetry and the other arts of late; a certain mannerism that has come to replace spontaneous originality or diversity of musical style. Two of the composers presented works that were overtly neo-classical, by which one means they overtly quoted or copied early 19th century tonal music styles. Does faux Mozart represent wit, these days? Does recycled classical tonal music represent what's cool? (If so, this is indeed Mannerist.) Is it more hip nowadays to sound Schubert than Messiaen? (If so, then I am indeed genuinely out of step with my times.)

In contrast, as my musician colleague reminded me later, my own music stood out in this listening session as the music with the most diverse range. Not that I do not have my own recognizable style and voice. Nonetheless, I presented sample pieces that were alternately consonant and dissonant, small-scale and epic, up-tempo and down. While it is true that I am more naturally drawn to life's adagios than to its allegros, my music can be passionately intense and celebratory, as well tranquil and contemplative.

And for this difference, this lack of sameness among the other composers in the listening session, I was dismissed.

Well, this was a feeling I've had before, of course. I've felt it many times at poetry readings, where I was also the odd man out (as it were). Even more so at poetry critique group gatherings, or at online poetry wrokshops. I recall more than one occasion where my poetry has been criticized for being too passionate, too intense—we do after all live in a culture and era skewed more towards Apollo than Dionysus, overall—and where I was told to "tone it down." It seems this is equally true for my music. Perhaps if I toned down my music, and blanded it out, it might be more acceptable and popular, at least to the untrained ear.

The irony is that I never set out to stand out from the pack, to be Original, or different, or unpopular and experimental (which are the same thing in most circles). I only ever set out to write in ways true to my experience and my inner life. Which is what I was taught that all artists are expected to do. Apparently there is more of popularity contest, more expectations of conformity, going on than I was early led to believe.

I grew up in a thoughtful household wherein was often repeated the myth of the Hero-Artist, the Solitary Innovative Genius. My mother, after all, was a classically trained pianist and teacher, and she had biographies on the family bookshelves of several great composers and performers, which I read avidly when young. I grew up thinking the composer's (and artist's) job was to explore or discover or invent the next new thing, not to repeat the old. I was raised in the belief that innovation in the arts was a positive value, a necessary contribution to cultural evolution.

And yet I am reminded, in recalling that childhood reading, of the constantly recurring narrative of bad reviews of genuinely original music. The popular, average, musically-untrained listener and reviewer almost universally despise the innovative when confronted with it in the present moment. No matter how much the average listener recycles the narrative of innovation in the arts throughout history, or the stories genius innovators, whenever they hear genuinely original music they at first misunderstand it, misrepresent it, even vilify it. One thinks of Beethoven in this context as much as Stravinsky or John Cage. Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and many other composers received notoriously horrible reviews of the premieres of works now considered classics, essential parts of the musical canon. John Cage, dead nearly two decades, and Charles Ives, dead nearly half a century, still get bad reviews. Cage once joked that his work was more acceptable to people when they thought of him as an inventor rather than a composer.

In other words, the ears of the average listener are in fact deeply conservative. They remain so.

In hearing the music presented by those other composers at that listening session, I wonder if perhaps they aren't wiser than I. If perhaps they are consciously aware that the music they compose is more conformist, more popular, more bland, and therefore more, to blunt, sellable. Certainly they've all received numerous prior commissions. Maybe they're on to something, and once again I'm just the odd man out.

To be clear, I make no claims for the originality of my own music. I never have. While it's true that my training as a composer is diverse and wide-ranging, in the end I just write what I hear in my head, and what I want to hear. I write the music that I want to listen to—that's the real bottom line. I can't help it if it seems unfamiliar, or strange, or original, or experimental to the untrained listener. I make neither apologies nor excuses for this.

I am aware of my influences, the most prominent of which are, paradoxically, the music of 14th century and 20th century composers. I find deep spiritual and emotional riches Bach's music, but I don't imitate him. I enjoy Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms, but I don't try to sound like them. If I listen for overt influences in my own music, I can hear Perotin as well as Steve Reich. I am aware of using techniques invented by Earle Brown and John Cage and Morton Feldman, but also others invented by Tomas Luis y Victoria, John Dowland, and William Byrd. Lately I hear a strong tendency, which I welcome rather than try to conceal, to absorb and redefine for myself the lineage of Debussy, Messiaen, and Takemitsu.

So it seems to me that my music is not particularly original or unusual. It's true that I prefer to write modally (which is part of the Medieval influence) rather than conventionally tonally, and that alone makes my music sound different than the neo-classicists. Perhaps the Mannerists are more adapted to the times, more tuned in than I, since after all it does seem as though we live in artistically Mannerist times. For most of post-Modernism nowadays is fundamentally mannerist.

It is perhaps a personal failing that I seem unable to conform, to blend in, to not stand out from the pack. It is very likely that the results of this listening session will be that one or another of these other composers, whose music is easy on the conservative ear, and non-threatening, will be chosen to undertake the new music commission being competed for. And not I. Maybe they're right, and I'm wrong. Maybe they're completely right that their more sellable music is the way to go, if you want to get commissions. Even if to my ears it is relatively dull and all sounds the same.

Well, what can I do? I seem unable to conform or blend in, no matter what I do. I've never been good at blending in with the pack, no matter how I've tried. All I have ever done artistically is try to be authentic, to be true to my inner experience, and to try to write the music that I want to listen to, write the poems I wanted to read, make photographs that I wanted to see. All I have ever done is pursue my own course. if that's not popular enough, if that's too "modern," I have to accept that there's nothing I can do about it. Well, I would love to receive this musical commission, in part because it would give me work for the next year; and it seems increasingly unlikely. In any event, I'll keep writing what I want to hear, even if no one else does.

Music and Nature

There's a Taoist saying that Only the music of nature is complete and undiminished. In other words, if I as a musician play one note I am already neglecting to listen to other sounds. Only by playing nothing can I hear all sounds in complete harmony. Listening is more important than making sound. Music is like wood carving, in that a carving is created at the expense of taking all that wood away.

In other words: Art is artifice. Everything we make, as creators of art, and as co-creators with the Divine, is artifice. We are artisans. There is no "natural" music from this viewpoint; except purely ambient natural sounds.

While in many ways I'm a Taoist at heart, as an artist I accept that my music-making creates neglect of the rest of the soundscape. In fact, I want it to: it's a summoning of focus. Not in an ego-affirming manner, but as a way of focusing attention, as in meditation. We pay attention to our breathing. We listen to the temple bell giving the hour, tolling the times to begin and end the day's activities.

The implied emphasis on listening as a way of becoming one, of emphasizing oneness, is worth contemplating. Listening is central to both hearing the music of nature and to making music. The most limited musicians are those who don't listen to what their peers are doing. While I am all for hearing one's own inner music, listening in the silence for those musics that rise up from within, I also like making music with other musicians. Ensemble playing requires listening; a kind of listening that's not too dissimilar from listening within. The bottom line in each case is that one must pay attention: mindfulness rather slackness is required.

There were a number of composers of 20th Century music who were very good listeners to the music of nature. Some were also transcribers. Some created frames for listening, with mindful attention to listening being practiced by both audience and performers, within the frame of the duration of the music's performance. Some others transcribed the sounds of nature, and the musics of other cultures, transcribed them into notation for performers to reproduce. If there's a contrast here between these kinds of composers, it's not a contrast of who listened to nature better; rather, it's the contrast between "hands on" and "hands off" the sounds themselves. The "hands off" method could be seen as allowing the environment to make its own sounds, which become the music. The "hands on" method is perhaps more about transcription from nature. One might include recordings of natural sounds in both of these approaches.

The "hands off" camp could be thought of as the aleatoric, indeterminacy, open-spaces composers who allowed silence into their musical frames: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, among others. The "hands on" camp could be thought of as Olivier Messiaen (birdsong transcriptions), Alan Hovhaness (And God Created Great Whales, which includes humpback whale songs in performance; I've played this piece in orchestra, and it was a real pleasure), Colin McPhee (transcribed Balinese gamelan appears in several orchestral and piano pieces), and others.

I'm not interested in creating one more dualistic dichotomy here, and I'll point out that there is overlap between these camps, both in terms of musical technique and musical philosophy. I'm talking about composers' means of using sound in musical space; these are technical approaches to sound existing among many other approaches.

The Taoist ideal of pure listening, and playing not a single note, appeals to me—but it cannot satisfy me completely. I am not a Taoist master or a Zen master, and not yet very non-attached or non-active. As a composer, I still feel called to make music: it's a response to music, to nature, to poetry, to life experiences. Making music is not merely ego-self-expression, but it is "expression" in the sense of having a need to express a response. I cannot help it: I must make music.

Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu thought about this extensively. In his book of essays on music, published late in life, Confronting Silence, Takemitsu has an entire chapter entitled "Nature and Music." In that chapter, he circles around music and nature several times, and also his need to respond musically to experiences in nature. This is what Takemitsu has to say about expression:

A lifestyle out of balance with nature is frightening. As long as we live, we aspire to harmonize with nature. It is this harmony in which the arts originate and to which they will eventually return. Harmony, or balance, in this sense does not mean regulation or control by ready-made rules. It is beyond functionalism. I believe what we call "expression" in art is really discovery, by one's own mode, of something new to this world. There is something about this word "expression," however, that alienates me: no matter how dedicated to the truth we may be, in the end when we see that what we have produced is artificial, it is false. I have never doubted that the love of art is the love of unreality.

Takemitsu echoes the Taoist saying here: art is artifice. Music is artificial. Music is unreal, a constructed thing, as much as it might seem to be discovered.

Yet music is not only expression. Music can be, in my experience, akin to a force of nature. The great Lakota shaman and healer Frank Fools Crow often referred to himself as “A little hollow bone for Great Spirit to blow through.” Fools Crow said his job was to keep the little hollow bone—like an eagle-bone whistle—clear of blockages, so that Great Spirit could always move easily through it. This is a discipline of readiness, of being prepared to receive nature through oneself, then get out of the way, so it can do its work. I feel this way about my creative work. As a composer, I have often felt like a little hollow bone, with something greater than I blowing through. The sounds and shapes and gestures come in a single breath, no matter how many more breaths it takes me to transcribe them, write them down, play them back. Jazz master composer and trumpeter Lester Bowie used to say how he had permanent 24-hour soundtrack playing in his mind; all he had to was bring it into audibility for the rest of us to hear it, by dipping into the soundtrack and playing what he heard; but the inner soundtrack was always there. This echoes my own experience of always having music playing in my head. (It also echoes a mythic Balinese story about the origins of music.)

What I get from all this is that music is expression, but it is not necessarily self-expression. The self, the ego-personality, is not what is being expressed here: it is not in charge of the process, in fact it has to “get out of the way.”

In order to move music-making away from ego-self-expression, and more in alliance with the music of nature, Takemitsu writes a bit later on:

I wish to free sounds from the trite rules of music, rules that are in turn stifled by formulas and calculations. I want to give sounds the freedom to breathe. Rather than on the ideology of self-expression, music should be based on a profound relationship to nature—sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh. When sounds are possessed by ideas instead of having their own identity, music suffers.

Takemitsu explores ways of making this idea practical. One possibility is through an ethnological approach—what McPhee did with Balinese music, what Benjamin Britten did with Noh drama, what Takemitsu has done with combining traditional Japanese musical genres (gagaku, for example) with the modern orchestra. But the ethnological approach, which is a transcriptional “hands on” approach, Takemitsu in the end decides is not completely honest, because it is detached, observational, even analytical. The composer wants a more active relationship to the present moment.

Another possible to way to free sounds is to contrast them with silence. Takemitsu writes:

Music is either sound or silence. As long as I live I shall choose sound as something to confront a silence. That sound should be a single, strong sound.

I wonder if the task of the composer should not be that of presenting the basic unaltered form of music.

I think of the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi, which to me contain huge amounts of silence. There is a tradition of natural forms, forms made to seem natural, based on nature, in which something very simple and elegant occurs. I think of Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures that are built on-site, always out of natural materials, some of which endure less than a day, some of which—the running stone walls, for example—which might endure a lifetime.

It is often considered an advanced technique, for example in the design of Japanese gardens, for the end result to appear effortless. But this too is unnatural: it is a technical accomplishment intended to be seen as natural. It remains artifice. Whether it is more self-conscious of its artifice than a less masterful result is perhaps debatable; but the aesthetic of apparent randomness is the end result of careful planning. This leads us to the paradox of artlessness vs. control. I think of Pierre Boulez’ Second Piano Sonata, which was composed using the principle of “total serialism”: every single aspect of the piece is subjected to cyclic mathematical determination a la the Schoenbergian tone-row, including pitch, dynamics, duration, and so forth. The end result is a piece in which every single aspect of the music is carefully determined and controlled—and which, when performed, sounds completely random and chaotic. How do we respond to self-conscious artlessness? Takemitsu writes:

The term “anti-virtuoso” appears to have a profound spiritual depth but in reality is closely related to the intellect, and in the end it is really rooted in the notion of human superiority over nature. This is not the way to confront silence. We cannot avoid the silence of death that awaits us. For this reason I spoke earlier of the gentleness and cruelty of nature. If a work depends on technique it will be picked bare by nature, its bleaching bones left to become part of the landscape.

A Japanese garden must be constantly tended, constantly repaired. The most artless-appearing, natural-seeming corner must be maintained by the gardener to seem so natural and artless. This is the invisible hand of tradition, of artifice, that invisibly, delicately continues to pretend not to be present.

Gagaku, the classical Japanese court music, lacks the Western concept of beat or measure. There is no pulse to this music. Sounds rise and fall, almost as though unrelated. But the music also expresses the Buddhist idea of codependent origination, in which it is seen that nothing arises in isolation, but everything arises in context and interrelationship with everything else. The pauses in the music have to do with eternity, with silence. They seem much longer than they really are. Takemitsu contrasts this timeless sense within the music as follows:

Western music has been carefully classified within a narrow system of sounds, and its presentation has been systematically notated. Rests within a score tend to be placed with mathematical compromises. Here the sound has lost its strength within the limitation of functionalism. Our task is to revive the basic power of sound. This can be done only by a new recognition of what sound really is. . . .

I have referred to the “stream of sounds.” This is not only an impressionistic description but a phrase intended to contrast with the usual method of composition in music—that of superimposing sounds one on another. This is not a matter of creating new space by merely dividing it, but it does pose a question: By admitting a new perception of space and giving it an active sense, is it not possible to discover a new unexpected, unexplored world? This is the same as recognizing sound as an object. Listening to the sho [the instrument in gagaku that maintains a continuous thread of sound] I began to think of a basic creative approach to negative space.

Negative space in art is what surrounds the object of interest: the surrounding emptiness. Negative space in painting is empty space, or unrevealed, unfulfilled space. It may be highly painted, yet to the eye it seems to be a void. Takemitsu’s idea of negative space in music seems to be, to me, a sense of timelessness, or rhythmic absence: anything can happen, any sound can manifest, but the duration of time is not broken into pulses, beats, or measures. It simply is time. In exploring this possibility, both Takemitsu and Messiaen have created musical spaces that seem to just float, like clouds or caves, with no beginning or end. They may change shape, but they don’t hurry anywhere. They simply are.

Sound permeates me, linking me to the world. I give sounds active meaning. By doing this I am assured of being in the sounds, becoming one with them. To me this is the greatest reality. it is not that I shape anything, but rather that I desire to merge with the world. . . .

What I have been saying is that we must give meaning to sound by returning it to its original state as a naked being. Sounds themselves, their movement as personalized beings—that is what we must discover and continue to discover anew. Organized sound is merely the subjective creation of the human being and is not the personalized sound I am discussing. My phrase “give meaning to sound” refers to something other than mere naming and differentiating. It concerns a total image. Both my acceptance and my suspicion of “chance music” stem from this point of view.

So we return to our original Taoist insights into sound: and are left with another paradox, of both acceptance of the ideal or non-action and letting sound be sound, and rejection of musical frames that are only a duration of time in which any sound made by the environment is reborn as “music” merely by existing within the musical frame. We must both accept and reject that kind of imposed purity. On one level, it’s a revelation that sound is music, and music is nature, and nature is full of sound. On another level, it so removes the composer from his interposition between nature and audience as sound-interpreter as to make music meaningless.

What the artifice of music leads us to, then—and this is what “expression” is all about, as opposed to self-expression, is that there is something in the music that goes beyond its collection of performed sounds. Takemitsu calls it a special element that cannot be rationalized or explained. He says that music which succeeds in expression captured space and time beyond everyday life, shaping and moving according to the will of the composer. (Takemitsu is discussing the gong sounds, the campanology, or bell-ringing, in Toshiro Mayuzumi’s Nirvana Symphony.) Towards this end, Takemitsu quotes poet and critic Makoto Ooka, who writes about poetry as follows:

The words in poetry are something like iron filings on a sheet or paper: they can be arranged by a magnet and be made to rise, all pointing in one directions. Once a certain vital power penetrates words, the words themselves are abandoned, transformed by that power. Each word beings to show a magnetic character. Words gain direction.

It is interesting to think of this magnetism of meaning, or expression, in terms of music, as well as in poetry. The sounds used in a musical piece can also be magnetized towards some vital power. This is the power of music to evoke experience in the listener—what has superficially and inaccurately been called music “universal language,” i.e. the ability of music to arose emotion, contemplation, and active imagination when listened to. The only way in which music is a “universal language” is because it is made of sounds, and the natural phenomenal nature of sounds are something we all (naturally) share in common. We live in a world immersed in sound. What makes music universal is what makes it natural. There is an excitement, a life-force arousal, that happens when we actively listen to music.

At the end of his chapter on :Nature and Music,” Takemitsu takes this back to expression, to the search for the music of nature, where we began with our Taoist sayings. I can conclude this meditation no better than to quote Takemitsu’s again:

The excitement music provides goes beyond verbalization. And that is the reason we find meaning there.

That time when we are truly impressed by a human being occurs when we see great power working within a small humble person. This is also true of words. That is, we are impressed, not by description, but by something elevated to “expression.”

Writing About Music

I've written before about the blind spots that writers often have about music—specifically, poets who have an apparent inability to understand how music is its own force, not merely a support for song lyrics. I have also considered before about how audio performance, for example radiobroadcast, might be a genuine enhancement for much contemporary poetry; but I suspect that the poets' blind spots will keep this from happening, too, as most poets of my acquaintance seem to believe that print presentation trumps any other form, and should. No wonder there are floating accusations of hermeticism and irrelevance circling much poetry criticism nowadays.

Geeta Dayal has written a book about Brian Eno and the making of his 1975 album Another Green World, both a history of an influential album that lies at the root of much contemporary electronic pop music, but also an examination of the creative process. (The book is published by Continuum, and can be found here.) An interesting aspect of this book about a classic album is that both of the creators used the Oblique Strategies deck of cards (developed by Eno and Peter Schmidt), which is designed to help an artist break through blocks, mental ruts, and other impediments. Eno used the Obllique Strategies cards throughout the making of his album; and Dayal used the cards to help her write her book about the album. (I love the Oblique Strategies, and have been known to use them myself from time to time.)

Author Geeta Dayal was recently interviewed on PRI's weekly arts & humanities program To the Best of Our Knowledge. (Their podcast, which I highly recommend, can be found here.) Listening to this interview was a real treat for me, because it pointed out many ways in which the arts can interface, and that creativity is a way of life, not a hobby. (Seriously, this entire program is well worth a listen. You can listen or download this program here.)

Dayal said some interesting things during this interview, but one particular set of comments really struck home with me, and clarified my thinking about writers' blind spots about the other arts, and why so many writers so often fail at conveying the experience of being involved with music, of being immersed in the process of musical creation and performance. (Rock criticism, generally speaking, is even more full of clichéd rhetoric than poetry criticism.)

In Another Green World, only 5 out of 14 songs use lyrics, sung and/or spoken. Eno has been quoted as saying that the most important thing for him was to use the texture of the voice as a musical instrument; that the words don't mean that much to him, that the lyrics aren't even that important. The song's lyrics do add up to sentences, rather than random words, and they do mean something in themselves; but they're oblique, not foregrounded the way lyrics are in most songwriting: most of which tends to be about the music supporting or enhancing the meaning of the words. This is completely the opposite of that.

Dayal comments during the interview:

[Eno] was tired of this kind of hierarchy, of the voice being in the front. You have the singer in the front of the stage, the drummer in the back, you have a guitar player and a bass player. He wasn't into that any more. What he wanted was to sort of compress everything together, have everything be on the same level, have these sorts of layers.

I definitely think that one of the reasons why Eno is a particularly challenging person for rock critics to write about is simply because rock criticism really grew out of literary criticism, and poetry, in a lot of ways. There's a reason why so many people write about Bob Dylan: Dylan is somebody where you can really analyze the lyrics, and that's a comfortable place for a lot of writers to be.

Interviewer: And you don't have to write about the music.

Dayal: Writers, being writers, love talking about words. It makes sense. And so they love people like Bob Dylan, and you see Greil Marcus has written book after book after book about Bob Dylan! There's a reason why these really gifted writers go back to people like Dylan, or the Stones, or the Beatles, or whatever. When you have somebody who's like Brian Eno, who is saying "I really don't think the vocals are that important, I really don't think I'm that interested in the lyrics," it really stumps them. [laughter] Because they're like, then what do we write about? How are we going to say anything about this?

Now, for me, I spent many years just writing about pure electronic music. And so, I love writing about the sonics, about the sounds themselves. I got it, I understood. I actually prefer writing about someone like Eno, rather than breaking down and analyzing symbolism and meaning in rock lyrics.

I completely agree with this. I think Dayal has put her finger on a fundamental weakness of much music criticism, particularly about pop music genres. Writers, being writers, love talking about words. Fair enough, because that's both the drink and the essence of what writers do. But also, it creates this blind spot I'm talking about, in which writers are often stumped when trying to write about something that is not, or cannot be, contained in words; or is not made up of words.

Music criticism about symphonic literature is often metaphorical, even poetic, if you go back and read the classical music criticism of past centuries; yet the best of it discusses what the music evokes in the listener, and is more than mere descriptions or detailed historical notes. A lot of good rock criticism (Greil Marcus included) is about the history of the music itself: its roots, its origins, its lineage and results; it makes you understand the context of what you're listening to, as good criticism ought to do, deepening your experience of the art by surrounding your experience with complementary knowledge. But the best rock criticism (one thinks of Lester Bangs at times like this) re-creates the experience and power of the music in the reader—the way a poem needs to re-create the experience in the reader. In other ways, it's somatic, not merely cerebral: gutsy, not just intellectual.

There have been some great poems written about hearing the blues, to be sure—but that's an artist writing about art, not a critic writing about art.

My own background echoes Dayal's, as a writer: science-trained, involved with experimental music, non-verbal music, and avant-garde music, in whatever genre, including rock, from the beginning. I feel like I've finally encountered a rock critic who gets it, who understands my own viewpoint, because she seems to share it. (David Toop being one of the few others who gets it, and he himself being an avant-garde composer who's worked with Eno et al.) Most rock criticism, in my opinion and experience, is definitely word-fixated, I think largely for the reasons Dayal points out.

So writers tend to focus on the song lyrics—on the words—and don't have as much to say about the music. (I can analyze the music pretty readily—but I went to music school, where they shoved a lot more music theory down our throats than you could ever imagine, or desire to know about. Trust me on that one.) This leads directly to that blind spot writers have: in which they forget that songwriting is not writing, it is not a poetic form, it consists rather of the synergy of words-and-music together. Neither one complete without the other. The best songwriters raise the synergistic combination that is the song to much higher levels than either the song's melody or the song's words could attain alone, on their own. It's the synergy that matters. And that's why calling even great songwriters Poets, and building cults around their song lyrics as Poems, is absurd. You cannot analyze the words of a song, and ignore the music, and successfully comprehend the finished effect. They cannot be broken apart.

This goes a long way towards explaining the Cult of Bob Dylan, and the Cult of Leonard Cohen, in which both of these actually very good singer-songwriters are deifed into Poets—which they are not. Again and again it must be said, you can't really analyze a song lyric, purely as poetry, apart from the context of the music, which is the other part of the song. This is why many song lyrics, when presented as poems on the printed page, simply fall flat—or seem quaint and antiquated, with endless metrical end-rhymes. Those things pass by in the context of being sung, in the context of the music, but as words alone they can be trite. (Of course, saying any of this around members of the Cult of Dylan is unpopular, but it is nonetheless true. What Dayal says about those who write about Dylan is exactly correct.)

Other Musics

When people find out I'm a musician, they immediately assume pop. People tell me they love music, too, then they go through a list of bands, or singer-songwriters, or pop songs, or rock songs, or post-folk songs by famous singer-songwriters, or tell of their allegiances to the cults of Dylan or Cohen, or the religion of rock 'n roll. Almost no one ever mentions jazz, much less classical, or other musics. When they do, it's rare enough to be shocking.

Writers and poets pay too much attention to the words. Many fans think song lyrics are great poetry, not having any idea what poetry really is. Lots of fans who don't pay attention to the words pay attention only to the song's emotional content, and every song needs a guitar solo.

Everybody thinks the popular song form—which is basically the old poetic ballad form, with alternating verses and repeating choruses, and a bridge section before the last verse or two—is the form that all music takes. That the song is what music is. When people find out I'm a composer, they usually think I'm a songwriter.

I've been called worse than elitist and arrogant for saying this, but here it is:

Everything you think you know about music is wrong.

That's it, really. That's all there is to it. We can all go home, now. No, really.

Seriously, though, what most people think music is, is about one tenth of one percent of what music really is. Pop music may dominate commercial radio—but then, you ought to think about the relationship between pop music and commercial radio, since they are incestuous twins, and profits are both parent and spawn. The music business is about business, not about music.

Music is so much more than that superficial crap that passes for pop music these days—most of which is over-produced, performed by minor talents and perfected in the mix, marketed to the masses with sex and glitter and looks, and all about as profound as toast, slightly burnt. Music is much more than singer-songwriters, even the best of them—and the best of them have no cults of followers. Fans, maybe, but not cults.

So what is music, if not pop songs? If not singer-songwriter songs? If not, pure and simple, songs?

Music is creatively organized sounds in time. Music is the art of arranging sounds in sequence. Any sounds: there is no end to the kinds of sound that music can use. Music, unlike many other more static arts, always has a performance element, and always exists within time. Music both timebound and therefore narrative, and abstract and nonlinear and therefore non-narrative. Music doesn't have to have words; it doesn't have to be tied to words; it is not an inherently verbal artform.

You see, the biggest mistake you can make, if you think music is nothing but songs, as most people do, is to think that music has to have words to it. In fact, a great deal of very powerful, emotional, life-changing music is completely non-verbal, non-narrative, and nonlinear.

Most people think, without really thinking about it, that music is always made with the same scales, the same keys, the same pitches, tones, and notes. This too is completely wrong. The scales that you think are natural and true are just the scales you grew up with. Music is organized sounds in time—and every distinct musical culture in which humans make music uses different scales, pitches, and notes. There is some overlap, and there are some fundamental acoustical principles upon which all music is based. But no music culture solves the questions of what makes up music in exactly the same way, even considering the physical principles of acoustics. In fact, there are music cultures that deliberately do the opposite of what acoustical physics might suggest—to create unique and different sonic effects. There are intrinsic, consistent cultural norms within each music culture; but they vary from culture to culture.

Well, you get the point. This is the sort of occasional rant you're going to hear from frustrated composers and musicians; although it's shocking how many musicians also think music is mostly about songs. If you want to imagine the frustration, and why it happens, try explaining about something you know a lot about, to someone who has only a limited idea of what you know about, yet think they know all there is to know. If you've ever been boggled by a friend's missing the forest for the trees, you'll get it.

Well, never mind. The point is simple: Music is a lot more than you think it is, and a lot more diverse and unpredictable. Stop thinking from inside that box of the song form, and start opening your ears to other music. There are many, and many of these are wonderful, and worth discovering.

Music is not mere entertainment. It's not aural wallpaper. Entertainment is death. Music is life. Music matters.

The Pleasures of Eclecticism

Driving to Michigan yesterday, I listened to country music on the truck stereo the entire drive.

That will shock some of my friends, who might think, because I'm a classically-trained composer who plays jazz and experimental music most of the time, that country music is beneath me. My feeling is that every artistic genre has got some great stuff, a lot of mediocre stuff, and some really very bad stuff. Most art is mediocre, rather than bad or good; most art is bland and unthreatening. These issues of quality affect every genre of music. There's even some heavy metal that I like; though generally I don't like metal, probably at least as much for demographic and social reasons as for musical ones.

As I drove, I was listening to country music that I like: old-timey stuff, roots country, edging over the line occasionally into bluegrass and Southern rock, even jazz. I'm a Willie Nelson fan, a Johnny Cash fan, a Patsy Cline fan. I like old country, I like roots music, I like mountain music, bluegrass, blues, western swing, and all their intermingled derivatives. And I like jazz, and contemporary classical, experimental, and avant-garde music, too.

Most of what gets marketed as country music these days is as over-produced and over-packaged as the pop music coming out of Los Angeles. It's all about as shallow, and the subject matter is pretty much the same. Contemporary Nashville country music is basically rock & roll with a twang and a steel guitar. Who cares?

On the other hand, one thing you can say for most country music, even the mediocre stuff, is that it makes the miles go by faster on those long drives. Driving in the Western USA, where it might take you an entire day to cross one state, on the FM radio you get mostly two kinds of listening: country & western music stations; and Christian stations. Of course there is some overlap. When I take a long road trip, I always pack a hefty wallet of CDs, which might contain everything from obscure to centrist. Kitchens of Distinction, Joni Mitchell, J.S. Bach, October Project, Sarah MacLachlan, Perotin, a few favorite film soundtracks, Robert Ashley, Morton Subotnick, Samuel Beckett, the Police, and John Dowlnad. You carry with you a wide variety so you always have something to match your mood.

I was listening in the truck as I drove yesterday to Charlie Haden's new CD, released this past fall, that he recorded with his family and friends. The CD is titled Rambling Boy, an iconic title for an album by one of our greatest living improvising bassists. He began as a singer with his family radio show band, the youngest of the clan, and grew up singing country music on the radio. When he switched to playing bass, it was partly because he had discovered jazz. This album brings Charlie Haden full circle to his roots. It's one of my favorite CDs right now, and definitely one of the best of 2008.

I also listened to Stars and Stripes Forever, from the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band, from the 1079s. I found that CD a few days ago in a thrift store, and it caught my eye. This was one of those great iconic bands of that anything-goes era in music, that I didn't really know much about. The Dirt Band played in a lot of styles, though, not "pure" country. Bluegrass, jazz, rock, and novelty songs were all in the mix. This album features some interviews and live performances; it's historical as well as good listening.

My point here is a simple one, and one that gets overlooked in most criticism in the arts: the person's right to be eclectic, even inconsistent, in their tastes, and their right to be independent of fashion and trends. I like music from around the world, and I like music from almost every era in Western music history. I'm partial to certain periods—Elizabethan England, High Gothic organum from the school of Paris, contemporary experimental music—and locations—Indian music, Javanese gamelan, American Indian drum, and some others. I don't think it's necessary to reconcile liking such a diverse variety. The main thing is that one enjoys them all.

Where most critics fail is their tendency to think that their personal tastes indicate quality. In fact, even critics who are relatively objective in their assessments of whatever kind of art they study and respond to, and who are relatively able to sort out their personal taste from their critical assessment—even those relatively objective critics still make judgments that are more subjective than they imagine. I don't trust a critic who claims that it's all fair game, and artistic quality it purely subjective. But I also don't trust a critic who claims to be more objective than everybody else, all of the time—even if they usually are. No one can make such a claim without eventually sticking their foot in their mouth.

What I write as a critic doesn't have to be fan mail. But it also doesn't have to be a hatchet job. Far too many critics equate objectivity with negativity. Far too few critics state what succeeds in a given work of art as well as what has failed. And even relatively objective critics occasionally completely miss the point. It's called being human, and it carries no shame—so long as one can learn from one's own mistakes, and be willing to revise one's opinions.

But as a reader I can afford to be eclectic, wide-ranging, and contradictory. I can like all sorts of incompatible artistic products. Maybe you don't like them all for the same reasons. I do read trash science fiction, sometimes, for the pure pleasure of the tale; space opera is great fun, even if isn't great literature.

When I read, I read for pleasure, for knowledge, for curiosity, for much more. When I read, I am not required to be a critic. I think one problem critics have is they don't know when to stop: sit down, shut up, read a book for pure pleasure rather than for having to form an opinion about it. I do think most poets need to write more criticism; there is a certain slacking off in critical thinking, in general, when a whole rack of poets claim that they're Artistes, not thinkers. Their thinking is abandoned in favor of pure feeling, to the ultimate benefit of neither.

In artistic appreciation, one is not required to choose sides. It's not an either/or choice to like both Willie Nelson and John Coltrane. It's a both/and choice.

Never be ashamed of having eclectic tastes. People who like only one kind of music, or one kind of poetry, are usually as narrow in their other views as they are in their aesthetic choices. People who you share no common ground with politically can still be your friends at the saloon. In fact, how else are we all to find common ground, if not in what we like to listen to, to read, and to talk about? How narrow the world must be for those do not have eclectic tastes. That's not an interesting enough world, in my view, to want to live in.

The Perfect Album

There are several aspects of the perfect album of music, released as a record or CD or an MP3 playlist or whatever. Some artists achieve one perfect album, and never again; some others achieve more than one, which can be a sign of brilliance or luck, depending.

I have a few criteria for what constitutes a perfect album; some of my points are about content, and others are about presentation. I note before getting into the details that my criteria are not entirely subjective—perhaps more objective than most—because I talk about production values as well as aesthetic ones. I want to be clear that this is not a list of favorite albums. A perfect album can be one I respect as perfect, but it might not be my favorite, and I might not listen to it as often as some others.

Most critics fail utterly in making distinctions between their personal taste and what they present as great art; I am very clear that those two categories do not necessarily overlap, as any honest and reasonably impartial critic will admit. The things we love the most are often flawed. The things we respect the most might not be our personal favorites. It is wise to be aware of the distinction.

Here's my criteria:

A perfect album carries a piece of music that is perfect in itself; you cannot imagine adding to or taking away from it, it is complete and self-contained. It might be a set of songs that are complete in themselves, as songs, but also add up together to form a larger experience, a unified whole. A perfect album is a unified experience just as much as it is a compilation of pieces.

In a perfect album, there is not one misstep in the writing, no slack pieces, no filler. Every piece was meant to be there, and you cannot imagine the album without them. (Note: Most listeners tend to pay attention to music on the song-level, rather than the album-level. That's a problem, because there are plenty of great albums that were composed to be complete albums, to make a journey, to carry you all the way through a story.) The songs may be eclectic in style, but the segues between them are all good and appropriate.

A perfect album is just the right length to leave you feeling satiated and complete, but also wanting more. You are enticed to go back and listen to it all over again. A perfect album invites repeated listening, and each time you listen to it, you hear something new in it. A perfect album is endless, and mysteriously bottomless in terms of your attention, even as it is a self-contained entity with known limits to its duration.

A perfect album has perfect production and mixing: all the voices are clear and present and appropriately placed and mixed. The sounds are good, the microphones were well-chosen and placed, the panning and placement in the aural field of each voice is good and true. The mixing must be perfectly appropriate for the character of the music: glossy where it should be, grungy where it must be.

In a perfect album, sometimes the singer's voice is not placed front and center. Are you surprised by that? Then you've been hoodwinked by popular music's habitual assumptions about mixing and voice placement. Sometimes a really good song pulls you in because the mix makes you work to hear what's going on; that is one kind of perfect and appropriate mix.

A perfect album has all the right and true instrumental choices in the arrangement and the mix. When it's supposed to be a guitar solo, it has one. When it's supposed to be solo piano, that's what it has. When symphonic strings are appropriate, there they are. It's as if the arranger read your mind. (Good arrangers and composers have a knack for appropriate instrumentation, a truth rarely known or discussed outside music-theoretical circles.) A perfect album can range over a lot of styles and moods, and have great variety in its arrangements. The important thing to remember is that the production values and performance choices all serve the music, and in service to the music, do whatever is necessary acoustically and musically.

Sometimes serving the music means that a perfect album's author and/or producer hired the right session musicians, the right performers, the perfect musicians, the right orchestra. Picking the best people for the job is what the great record producers and recording artists have always known how to do, and the results can be a quantum leap greater than if those particular musicians had not been involved. This is one area in which synergy matters a great deal, and can be most obvious to the listener's ear.

A perfect album can be hard for some people to listen to, because it doesn't meet their preconceived notions of what (good) music should be; usually these are unquestioned cultural notions, things that people think are right and true only because they've heard them done that way a zillion times before. But the masses are not always right. Sometimes the surprising choice can push a piece of music to the next level, to a place where it transcends everything around it. A perfect album can also be hard for some people to listen to because it is an intense emotional experience; it stretches them and makes them think and feel, when they would rather be passively entertained. But a perfect album is not passive entertainment: it invites actively listening, active participation, active response.

When you listen to a perfect album, there's nothing you could change or improve. Nothing to be added, nothing that can be safely taken away. All wheat, no chaff. It is all as it must be, as it should have been.

Some artists achieve individual perfect songs or pieces of music, but never make a perfect album. Sometimes a perfect album depends on the artist's collaborators and peers who helped it all come together and synergize into something greater than the sum of its parts. The list of perfect songs, performances, and pieces of music, is another list for another day.

Here's a short, partial list of what I know are perfect albums. I've no doubt left a few off the list. There is overlap here with my "desert island" list of music—those albums you'd want to have with you if you marooned on a desert island, and had nothing else to listen to for a long time—but that list is slightly different. What I might take with me are things that are comfort-food albums as much as they are perfect albums; so some of those for one reason or another might not make this list, although they are otherwise beloved albums.

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Joni Mitchell: Hejira

Steely Dan: Aja

Henryk Gorecki: Symphony No. 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Dawn Upshaw, soprano; the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Zinman.

Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians.

Nicky Skopelitis: Ekstasis. (Produced by Bill Laswell, who has more than his fair share as a producer and bassist of perfect albums to his credit.)

Pete Namlook and Bill Laswell: Psychonavigation

Mike Oldfield: Ommadawn

Astor Piazzolla: Tango: Zero Hour. (Produced by Kip Hanrahan, who own albums released under his own name often approach perfection, and are otherwise simply amazing musical documents in their own right.)

Wendy Carlos: Switched-on Bach

Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach (the 6 Cello Suites)

King Crimson: Discipline

John Cage, with David Tudor: Indeterminacy

John Coltrane: Ascension

Louis Sclavis/Dominique Pifarély: Acoustic Quarter

Jan Garbarek, with Ralph Towner: Dis

Henry Wolff & Nancy Hennings: Tibetan Bells. (The first in a series; only this first record has not made the transition to CD, which is a loss to humanity.)

David Sylvian & Robert Fripp: The First Day

The Tony Bennett / Bill Evans Album

Enigma: M C M X C a.D.

Jonathon Elias: Requiem for the Americas: Songs from the Lost World

Peter Gabriel: Us

Low Pop Suicide: The Disengagement EP

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Addendum: A few more albums to be added to the list.

Willie Nelson: Stardust

Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

Nikolai Miaskovsky: An Appreciation

I have a soft spot in my heart for a certain period in Russian classical music: that transition from late Romanticism to early Modernism, when new languages and themes were beginning to emerge, but the old concepts, in their uniquely Slav tones, still had a powerful voice. Much of this music was written during the first half of the 20th Century, and is overtly tonal rather than avant-garde; of course, during the Stalin years, approved musical styles were often limited, with experimentation and innovation often frowned upon. Still, much early Modern Russian and eastern European music composed around this time has qualities of angularity and inwardness that I am attracted to; tendencies which only become more overtly developed, later in the century, in the Polish and Russian musical avant-gardes.

I recently rediscovered a piece I had loved and listened to often in my teens: Nikolai Miaskovsky's Cello Concerto, Op. 66. This is a late work for this composer, from 1944; it has been recorded numerous times, not least by Rostropovich. It's an unusual concerto in that it is in two movements, with an overall slow-fast-slow form, emphasizing lyrical melodicism over virtuoso technical display. Your typical concerto is in three movements, usually fast-slow-fast; Miaskovsky reverses those expectations to great effect, even as the conclusion of the second movement is a capsule reiteration of the first movement, a return to mood and theme.

The emphasis on melody does not mean this is an easy work to play, however, either interpretatively or technically; there are two extensive passages, for example, which require the soloist to play continuous double-stops in solo counterpoint. And sustaining an even voice throughout, in a piece that requires one to play with passionate intensity in every register of the intsrument, can leave a soloist wrung out and limp, afterwards.

Miaskovsky has been compared by some music critics to Tschaikovsky. I resist this comparison, in part because I think it's lazy and superficial, but also because it doesn't give Miaskovsky enough credit for having his own voice and style. There are many ways the two composers differ, to my ears, not least of which is that Piotr Illyich was a late Romantic, while Nikolai was an early Modern. Piotr was a populist, a crowd-pleaser; Nikolai was more of a classicist, occasionally astringent, often darker. He was also a professional teacher of music composition; among his students were Kabalevsky, several of whose piano pieces I played in my youth, and Khachaturian. One thing that Miaskovsky does share with his more famous predecessor is a love of dramatic climax; there are several points of dramatic tension and crescendo within Miaskovsky compositions that reach satisfying high points and resolutions.

The Cello Concerto is not a "happy peasant" work, or a folksy work, but a "dark and brooding Slav" work. The melodic themes often twist and turn in unexpected directions, and there is a great deal of unpredictable chromaticism. It is sometimes hard to pin down a tonal center, as the music can be modal and almost atonal; yet without ever losing its emotional charge. Miaskovsky was a composer whose music is always passionate and emotional, even at its most non-tonal, but eschews the overt necessity of a narrative-dramatic "program," or scenario. It's not about a story, it is a story. Following where Miaskovsky leads, during the Cello Concerto, you go on a long journey through several moods and tempi; arriving, at the last, having been through almost 40 minutes of compelling melody, at the last two chords of the piece. They are delicately soft, almost silent, the cello having risen in its last melodic line, growing ever softer, to hold a sustained final note in the violin register. Then, while the soloist holds that final note, the full orchestra very gently plays two final chords, separated by a silent pause.

Those last two chords, after all you have been through to get there, are themselves a compressed journey of tension-and-release, summing up all the strictures of tonal music with a precise, sure touch. And they are sublime and tragic enough to make one weep, they are so soft, so beautiful.

Perhaps it is the Slav soul, that dark soul, that sense of relentless tragedy despite everything, expressed in music, that is so affecting about this concerto, and other music from this period. Perhaps it is that fatalistic Russian sense of life and its shortness—no matter what else happens, the wolves are always and forever chasing the sleigh—or perhaps it simply that the history of Russia, in the first few decades of the 20th Century, brought out so much horror and shock, that it marked all the arts, for decades to come.

I don't know. All I have to show for it all is those last two chords in this Cello Concerto, that, every time I hear them, make me become still, and silent, and inward, and on the verge of tears. That is an honesty, a mature emotional honesty, that is all too rare in contemporary music; so we must treasure it, wherever we may find it.

On Improvisation 2: Provoking Judgment

In societies where music is not written down, informed and accurate listening is as important and as much a measure of musical ability as is performance, because it is the only means of ensuring continuity of the musical tradition. Music is a product of the behavior of human groups, whether formal or informal: it is humanly organized sound. And, although different societies tend to have different ideas about what they regard as music, all definitions are based on some consensus of opinion about the principles on which the sounds of music should be organized. No such consensus can exist until there is some common ground of experience, and unless different people are able to hear and recognize patterns in the sounds that reach their ears. —John Blacking

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—William Butler Yeats, Among School Children

It’s not enough to just play music. It’s not enough to play only other peoples’ music. (Put your Instant Music in your Mr. Coffee and the Java Jive comes out.) It’s also not enough to only write music. Scores, compositions, notations of all kinds, are a visual/literate representation of the sounds intended/created/evoked in performance. No, to get the full experience, you have to do it all. Play, write, reproduce, recreate, create, play. You have to be music.

Musical improvisation can be thought of as spontaneous composition. But: jazz improvisation is not purely constructed: like any coherent musical tradition (structured system), it has rules of thumb, tendencies, and stereotypical behaviors. The soloist relates notes and patterns vertically to the harmonic chords of the tune: the “changes” are actually the things that don’t get changed. Jazz is (traditionally) a highly structured musical system, with its own stylistic idioms, genres, and stereotypical expressive devices. All musical traditions are like this. (Learning these things well gets you “inside” the tradition.)

No musical tradition is inherently superior or inferior to another, no closer or further from some absolute standard of musical/sonic reality. Non are intrinsically based on purely acoustical/physical phenomena. Every human culture seems to articulate an intrinsic human need to make music (humanly organized sound)—but there are so many kinds of music.

We must be careful about how we judge other musical systems than the one(s) we most associate with. We tend to be snobs. Many “jazz musicians” tend to be as precisely elitist and purist as the Western “classical musicians” often put into aesthetic opposition: beat/square, hip/straight, cool/out-of-it, relaxed/uptight. (Freaks/conformists. Do you wear “weird” as a badge of honor?) Well, baby, I’ve got news for you: jazz too can be square, uptight, conformist, and all that, too.

I have a dream.

I have a dream of an improvised music without constraints. Without judgment, without ego, without editing to conform to personal taste. I am searching for a pure form, if you will, of improvised music, freed of cultural inheritances and any judgments about what music is supposed to be. Improvised music existing in a value-free domain. It’s hard work; I may spend my whole life in quest of it, and never achieve it. Why? Because I too am a bearer of learned culture.

I am constantly encountering, recognizing, and identifying assumptions about music that I carry within myself—and then doing my utmost to explode them. Blow ‘em up, leave ‘em behind, discard ‘em like used food wrappers. I keep finding new layers of assumption in myself: raze one, only to encounter another underneath. They appear to recede endlessly.

But: I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not doing this just in my musical life, but in my life as a whole. It’s a huge, worthwhile challenge, and in the end it will kill me.

Life is an improvisation.

Life is an improvisation where you don’t know the rules, the conductor is too far away to see, half the keys on your ax don’t do what they’re supposed to, the score is illegible, and your hands seem to dissolve and reappear with a will of their own.

Isn’t that wonderful?

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Recommended Reading:

John Blacking: How Musical Is Man? University of Washington Press, 1973.
John Cage: Silence, Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
Nikos Kazantzakis: The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, Touchstone, 1960.

Recommended Explosive Listening:

Paul Schütze: New Maps of Hell, Extreme Records, 1992.
John Cage: Indeterminacy, Folkways Records, 1959.
Nicky Skopelitis: Ekstasis, Axiom/Island Records, 1993.

On Improvisation 1

Improvisation is not “just anything”; it can have the same satisfying sense of structure and wholeness as a planned composition. But there is a case to made for the opposite side. There is a time to do just anything, to experiment without fear of consequences, to have a play space safe from fear of criticism, so that we can bring out our unconscious material without censoring it first. —Stephen Nachmanovitch.

The creative process begins with the inner ear, with the imagination. The process continues with the manifestation of this inner auditory experience in the vibrational spectrum. Voice, instruments and human interaction enter the picture. This inner auditory vision is expressed as a unique human story through the development of musical langauge. Any new musical language must be based on understanding existing musical languages in their uniqueness and through their underlying universal principles. The principles are based on an essence in its dual manifestation: Sound as rhythm and rhythm as sound.

In improvisational music, the human interplay of this manifestation becomes dialgoue. It is the mirror which reflects both group and individual states at the moment of creation, bringing us together in our most human being. —Adam Rudolph

What is improvisation?

Improvisation is play, instantaneous creation. When I get up to play, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a lot like life. (Jerzy Kozinki once said in an interview: Novels are rehearsals for life.) We follow the rules we’ve learned, or make up new rules. Rules are a safety net, a sense of security we build for ourselves. The forms we use to structure our music are the forms we use to structure our lives. The creative life is about change, because creation requires change and growth, the search for the ability to see through the structures we invent to the common vacuum field behind the world we imagine to be solid. Every tradition we now hold sacred had, at one time, to be invented. Who did the inventing? People did.

How do we learn to begin to improvise? The real question is: What’s stopping us?

Zen Buddhism talks about beginner’s mind, the mind that is always open, the ability to see things as always fresh and new. The saying goes: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. The trick is not to seek inspiration, but to get out of its way.

Where does improvisation come from?

Head, heart, and hands. In any musical culture, the learned musical tradition shapes the spontaneous musical expressions of the culture-bearer: forms and rules that at the time are accepted as the grammar of the voicings. (Whether you follow them or rebel against them, they are the heritage you learned.) This is the head’s contribution.

The hands’ contribution is in the material products of culture, the physical techniques and instruments we use to make music. (I include voice here, as it is the original instrument.) These are as much products of musical culture as the ideas we have about the music we make, and the evolution of a musical language and the insturments to produce the music often develop together. The history of jazz is deeply intertwined with the history of the saxophone and the drumkit, for example.

What the heart brings to the music is feeling, intuition, and inspiration. For many, playing music is more about expressing feelings than thoughts. Improvisation is the spontaneous expression of inscape. Heart is also the will, the compulsion to create. Many creative people feel they don’t have a choice: they feel required to do what they do, even at great personal cost.

But head, hand, and heart must work together. Balance is essential. If the hands dominate, one can get lost in technique for its own sake. If the head rules the world (so easy a trap, and so common, especially perhaps in poetry), one can think too much before acting. and get lost in games. If the heart swoons romantically, we can be overly self-indulgent, sentimental and shallow, believing every puerile gesture profound. None of these are enough by themselves: balancing all three results in better music.

Meditations On Listening

Sonny Sharrock & Nicky Skopelitis: Faith Moves (CMP)
Material: Hallucination Engine (Axiom)
Bill Laswell: Hear No Evil (Virgin)
John Coltrane (with Eric Dolphy): Africa/Brass (Impulse)
John Coltrane (with Pharoah Sanders): Meditations (Impulse) and Ascension (Impulse)
Hedningarna: Hippjokk and Tra (NorthSound)
Robert Fripp & David Sylvian: The First Day (Virgin)
Jan Garbarek: Legend of the Seven Dreams and Dis

Sometimes I think about what people hear, when listening to music like this. Some of this list is ecstatic music, a lot of it pretty out on the fringe (to some ways of thinking), and some of it is soulful. Or all of the above. I know what I hear: music that excites me, that gets both my blood and mind going full-throttle. It's loud, it's aggerssive, it's jazz, it's fusion, it's progressive, it's rock, it's unclassifiable, it's music. It's harmonically advanced, modal, and sometimes atonal and jagged-edged.

When we listen: Do we listen primarily to technique? Do we listen first for guts and soul and inspiration? How does how we listen affect our experience and our expectations. Some of it is mindset. Some approach music very cerebrally (headspace), and when listening to prog rock (for example) are counting changing meters, etc., as though music were a mathematical system first and foremost. Some others approach music from a more holistic heartspace, which is a different way of listening, not a better one. And some listen from a space that integrates intellect with heart; this is, in my opinion, the best, most complete way to listen. All of the above. Both/and.

Aural experience is immersive. Listening (unless one is hearing impaired) is a multi-dimensional binaural experience. You don't just hear music; you bathe in its vibrations, which strike your entire corporeal existence, your body, not just your ears. You listen with your lungs and your body, not just your ears. Sound is a medium were bathed in, enveloped in, surrounded by. We are in an atmosphere that is constantly in motion, in vibration, and some of those vibrations we perceive as sound.

The list of albums above, for me, approaches a "top ten desert island" list of listening. This reveals something about my tastes in listening, of course, but it also says something about my approach to music. Left off of this too-brief list, of course, are Gamelan and Bach and Debussy and Reich and Eno and shakuhachi honkyoku and many others that I listen to constantly. Looking at my iTunes playlists, all these are there, and more. I think Sting writes perfect little pop tunes better than most. Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn and Lynn Miles and Carol Noonan I revere as poets as well as largely-unsung guitar stylists. There are a lot of Bill Laswell projects on my lists, and John Cage, and The Art of Noise. There is at least as much avant-garde classical on my list as there is progressive rock or free jazz.

This marks me, perhaps, as a pathfinder rather than a hearthkeeper. I am drawn to experimentation, music that takes risks to achieve the possibility of ekstasis. I don't seek to preserve a tradition against dissolution, to turn it into frozen stone and stick it in a museum; as much as I respect many traditions, and have studed several, I tend to seek out New Traditions hybrids. I tend to see cultural change rather than cultural loss, evolution rather than dissolution. My tendency is progressive rather than regressive (which is a key reason I find Wynton Marsalis' regressive ideas and attitudes about jazz problematic and even dangerous at times).

So, when I listen to Hedningarna's Tra or Hippjokk, I hear the threads of traditional and new music that tie together into a new genre and new kind of music. I hear the traditional instruments of Sweden/Finnish folk music being used in new ways, in a punk-rock type setting at times. Hippjokk also features Wimme, a traditional Sami (Laplander) joik singer—joikking is shamanic singing that both describes and evokes the spirits of the living world—and things like Swedish keyed fiddles and hurdy-gurdys run through effects processors and distortion boxes.

I know someone who listens to Hedningarna primarily for the traditional aspects of the music—not the whole melange, but the older bits. Another friend that I have gone to see Hedningarna live with thinks of them as a trad-techno dance band and pogos all through the show. Wimme, on his own CDs and in live concerts, sings joik backed up by a small techno band that includes programmed drumbeats, synthesizer, and bass clarinet.

When even some jazz musicians listen to Coltrane's Ascension—I have had arguments over this with other jazz musicians—they hear cacophany, a lack of order, total chaos, an orchestra tuning up. I hear a Southern Baptist tent revival meeting combined with Indian raga melodies. I hear heterophony (simultaneous variation on a theme) rather than Western classical counterpoint (which is what those who argue against Coltrane, are arguing for), akin to the heterophony common to African and Indonesian traditional musics. I hear a higher level of order emerging from the apparent chaos, exactly as in nonlinear dynamic turbulent flows described by fractals and chaos theory, with higher-order stable states, transitional turbulence, and 2:1 stable energy flows.

I know that some musicians I know, when listening to The First Day focus on the technical chops of the players. I usually find myself focusing on the music they create. Things like meter, key signature, pattern, loop, motors, are all important parts of that mix; but I don't tend focus on them cerebrally, but viscerally. Years of martial arts training and percussion studies (especially "ethnic" percussion such as gamelan and frame drums) have gotten me to the point where I can tap out a meter by listening to it without having to actually count it out. 5/4, 7/4, and all the various 12/4 cycles are so familiar that I don't even think about them.

A humorous moment: A friend of mine is convinced that "You can't dance to 5/4!" I disputed him, and without telling him what I was doing, put on a track by October Project, and told him to dance to it. He found it effortless to dance to, even pleasurable—until I pointed it out that it was in 5/4. Then he seized up and got all flustered. My point is that it's all in your mind.

I think often that the ideas that we have about our ideas limit us. If you think that something is going to be hard to do, it probably will be. If you assume it to be effortless, and relax, it can in fact become effortless. What we believe about what we perceive affects what we perceive. As Richard Bach wrote in Illusions: Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.

Our ideas about reality create limits. It is not that the Universe is chaotic by nature, it is rather that we cannot perceive all scales of order that emerge from chaos. (Fractal geometry is the first Western philosophical conception
that allows for this.) J.B. Haldane said once, The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine. The more open your being is to new possibilities, new patterns, the more likely you are to be able to perceive them, and bring them to the ears and minds of others.

This is what Coltrane's search was all about, and it was ultimately a spiritual search: a spiritual evolution expressed through a musical evolution. The music was his voice. It is no wonder, therefore, that he eventually had to "break out" of standard jazz forms, harmonic stereotypes, tonal melody, and musical structures. His later recordings such as Ascension and Meditations push this far beyond the explorations of even his own earlier music, such as A Love Supreme and Africa/Brass.

Bach was writing in essentially a dead, archaic style of music that had already been passed over by most of his contemporaries. He was considered to be very old-fashioned during his lifetime. But he had the duende—that elusive "dark sound" talked about in Spanish gypsy poetry and flamenco music. The soul of flamenco is duende: not the flash dances, but the deep song (cante jondo) wrung from the depths of the soul. Astor Piazzolla also had the duende. In my opinion, Steve Reich sometimes has the duende, but Philip Glass does not, or only rarely. Sonny Sharrock definitely had the duende, and so does Hedningarna. Their album Tra (Wood) is awesome. David Sylvian occasionally summons the duende, but he keeps short-circuiting it because of ego.

Two different translations of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca's seminal essay on the duende can be found online here and here.

So, my list of albums is not only a list of musical progressives, or of musical ecstatics, it is also a list of "deep song," music with spiritual, emotional, and visceral, gutsy depths; not only mental depths, deep song contains both the eros/ekstasis of life and the risk of death. I don't find much progressive rock such as Dream Theater very interesting, frankly, because I often feel like the music is all cerebral counting-games. By contrast, I feel that most of Robert Fripp's projects, from King Crimson to his solo soundscapes and ambient work with Biran Eno, show spiritual depths as well as mental depths. This is why I go on and on sometimes about musicality over technical chops: if it doesn't move me in my guts, if it doesn't grip me spiritually, if it doesn't make my blood beat, it just can't sustain my interest very long. I don't find and have never found Rush to be interesting; I do find Primus to be interesting. Henryk Gorecki has the duende; so does Gyorgy Ligeti (which is one reason Stanley Kubrick kept using Ligeti's music in his films).

So, how we think about things really does color how we perceive things. As Haldane implied, if we can't conceive of something, it doesn't exist in our perception. Perhaps someone else will discover it, and bring it into our perceptual reality—I think Coltrane and Cage are both loved and derided for doing exactly that.

Sometimes, all it takes is a small change in mental perspective to realize that all we needed to do to fix a situation is a very small, almost meaningless shift. In cognitive psychology, this is sometimes called reframing.

I will never be the most technically adept of Stick players. I find rather that I tend to have an approach to Stick, and music in general, that is resonant with the ideas I've expressed above. I tend to emphasize musicality and depth rather than flash. In situations where I have taught Stick, photography, music composition, poetry writing, and Photoshop, I like to pull forward the gifts that make each student unique—their unique constellation of talents, if you will—and get them to see their individuality and personal style. Perhaps this is more like coaching than music theory class: the trick is get the student to see their own strengths, then undershore their self-confidence till they can stand on their own. The last thing I would ever want to be is a guru with a bunch of disciples; I much prefer to kick fledgling eagles out of the nest so they learn to fly on their own. As for Stick playing itself, I think I can hold my own musically; there are technical tricks others can do way better than I, and I think I can play well enough to express what I hear in my heart. I'm always getting better, though, which is just the gift of experience and practice. The day you think you know it all, is the day you're dead.