Playing and Making

Music performance and composition:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music is Life

There was never any doubt I was going to be a musician.

I started piano at age 6, as soon as we got home from India, at my mother's insistence. She herself had been a concert pianist, played live music on the radio, taught piano, and got her degree in piano and education, before my parents were married and took our family to India, where my father was a medical doctor. I had my first piano recital circa age 7,experiencing horrible stage fright. Thankfully, stage fright went away soon, and I've never really experienced it again. It was a function of profound shyness, which I still experience but have learned to work through, mostly; but with music performance, I am sure of myself when onstage, due to long experience. I studied piano with Frances Danforth in Ann Arbor; years later, after I had graduated from music school, we reversed roles and I tutored her in composition. I have a few of her solo piano music scores around here somewhere, including Karelian Light, which I remember as being a luminous tone poem for piano.

I did try to go into science in college, specifically geology, which I still love to read about, and look at rocks in outcrops. Nonetheless I followed my bliss and I transferred to music school for composition, against everyone's wishes, except for William Albright, the composition professor who became my mentor and academic advisor and friend.

Most of my career missteps in life have come from listening to "sensible" advice from family and friends who told me I'd never make a living in music or the arts, and that I should get sensible work, pay my bills on time, be an upstanding citizen, and so on—on one level they were right, but most of the years I worked as a graphic designer and desktop publisher in corporate culture I felt unfulfilled and unhappy, except on those rare occasions where I was allowed to use my creativity as part of the job. And let's be honest, that kind of job security was only false security in the long run: after many years in publishing I got kicked to the curb with little to show for it.

The only corporate jobs I ever liked were ones that allowed me to be creative, in whatever ways were available. I did like working for book and magazine publishers as a graphic artist, as I occasionally got turned loose creatively; and I taught myself to become a Photoshop expert during idle moments on the job.

In more recent years, sick and unable to work corporate hours anyway, I've written reams of poetry and essays, been commissioned to write large works of music, written several new songs, and a few new medium-scale compositions. I am writing more music now than I had in years, and almost all of it is getting performed. So I've come full circle from when I was in music school, when almost everything I wrote was performed; in part because I like writing for specific performers, many of whom ask me to write for them. It's not a guarantee of getting a performance, or even a good one, but it is incentive to write.

I have also been singing my own songs: for the first time, I have enough confidence in my own ability to play and sing my own songs, to be able to get onstage and do it. At first there was some stage fright. But what you learn from experience is that courage means being scared to death, and getting up there and doing it anyway. I am gradually gathering enough new songs, which I have written mostly for myself, to record an album. That will come to fruition in the near future, I hope.

Therefore I am always going to be someone who encourages young musicians to keep making music. Even if they don't make it their career, they will be better people, and happier for having music in their lives. As several psychological and medical studies have shown, playing music at a young age has many benefits later in life.

Music is life.

Living is dancing.

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.

Harvey Milk Day

Happy Birthday to Harvey Milk, and also to his legacy.



A couple of years ago, I was inspired, and I'm sure I was one among many, by the anniversary of Harvey Milk's death, to write a piece of music based on his words, and in his honor. I chose to set to music, for a capella male chorus, words from his famous late speeches and recordings. The music was premiered approximately one year ago, in concert.

I share it here in continuous celebration of the life and legacy of Harvey Milk.

Words by Harvey Milk
Music by Arthur Durkee
Performed by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, Madison, WI
dir. by Ken Forney

You Gotta Give 'Em Hope    

I know that you can't live on hope alone.
But without it, life is not worth living.
And you— and you— and you gotta give 'em hope.



Hope will never be silent.

I cannot say enough what these words means to me: Hope will never be silent. I set these words to music, more than any other, in my piece. It is the refrain. You gotta give 'em hope—hope will never be silent. That is the message of the music. If I am at all a good composer, I hope that I have made the words come alive for you.

I am not by nature a positive thinker, a deeply hopeful person, or a Pollyanna optimist. Despite what many people who know me think, I am also not, therefore, a person who is by nature a negative thinker, or a cynic, or a pessimist. I am none of those. What I am not, however, is blindly or thoughtlessly optimistic, or a positive thinker who ignores reality. If you look at the record of history, you can see that hope is one of the most important dynamos of change. But it is not blind hope, it is activist and effective hope. It is the kind of hope that Harvey Milk embodied: laughing hope, refusal to despair, willingness to speak out in opposition to oppression, even thoughtless and ignorant but otherwise unintentional oppression. He could have despaired. He did not. He never gave up. He inspired many to keep fighting for what was right, past every obstacle, even past threats of death, and actual murder.



If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.
Burst down the closet doors once and for all,
and stand up and start to fight!

Harvey Milk continues to inspire me. For me, his words are a beacon of hope. And I struggle with hope. Hope doesn't easily to me—because all too often the kind of hope that is presented to me is toxic hope, built on fantasies and expectations, that in the end leads only to more disappointment and suffering. That's not the kind of hope Harvey Milk teaches me to follow: he teaches me to follow difficult hope. Earned hope. Hope that has been earned by struggle, and by an occasionally stubborn unwillingness to give in to all-too-available despair. I often struggle with this. Despair comes all to easily to someone who has been through the dark night of the soul, and who is (hopefully) intelligent enough to observe and report on life as it is, not just as we wish it was. Harvey Milk teaches me clear-eyed hope. Hope that is real because it acknowledges suffering, and is built on experience rather than fantasy or ideology. Harvey Milk gives me hope.

This is why I wrote this music.

Cabaret 2014 Banner

Just finished designing and illustrating the poster and web banner for the next musical event that I will be part of: Cabaret.

This began with a photo shoot with members of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, I then used several different digital painting methods in combination, to make the main illustration. The titling were made in Illustrator, where I usually do logos, or titling that needs special effects work.

Poster Fun

Making a new poster for a fundraiser event, to be put on by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, featuring home cooked comfort food and musical performances. I didn't take the photos used, but I did do the graphic design and finished illustration. The idea was to evoke the old Norman Rockwell covers from The Saturday Evening Post, in style and mood. I'm pleased with the results. It does indeed evoke Rockwell.


(Click on image for larger view.)

I'm told that the guys modeling for the photo shoot also got to enjoy eating the props afterwards. Lucky guys!

The logo for the poster was my idea, and it was a fun piece to pull together. I found a typeface that closely matches the one used for the old magazine, then added the musical elements to evoke the nature of the event. So far the feedback has been all positive.

Meanwhile, hope some friends can come to the event. Not only will it be lots of fun, with lots of good food: I am premiering a new song that I recently finished writing.

Heartlands: Concert Premieres

The concert premieres of my major new musical work, Heartlands, on two consecutive days in Madison and Milwaukee, went well. There were a couple of performance glitches, but no train wrecks. Overall I am very pleased. I also had the two concerts video-recorded and audio-recorded, and what I have reviewed so far seems quite good.

The truth is, though, it's still too soon. I need a few more days. The whole experience leading up to the concerts was stressful and full of anxiety—wanting as perfect a performance as possible, etc.—and the weekend itself was so overwhelming and personally overstimulating for me, not in a bad way, that I put my mind on "record" rather than on "assess" and frankly am still in that mode.

I actually dislike immediate post-mortems of concert performances. Back in the years when I performed in other musical groups, there were times when there was a party right after the concert, and if a videotape had been made, it was put on the TV and everyone gathered around and watched themselves in the concert they had just finished a few hours ago. I hated that. I hated that. I would usually off in another room, mostly by myself, rather than joiing in the self-love-fest of post-concert concert watching.

For one thing, no one is objective about their performance so close to the actual event. Watching yourself on tape later is a good thing, from time to time—but it needs to days or even weeks later, when the thrill and excitement and adrenaline have faded somewhat. No one can be objective right away. That takes time. It takes time to know if the poem you wrote is good, or crap. It takes time for emotional stirrings to settle down.

It's a really, really bad idea to watch your own concert in full, right after you did it. it can skew your perceptions to the extreme, both positive and negative. It can very much mess up your ability to perform naturally, by making you far too self-conscious to relax. It can make your performances become very mannered and pretentious. It takes a rare person, with a rare sense of self-possession and self-knowledge to not be affected in any way by looking at themselves in such a mirror. Very few have the self-confidence to be unaffected enough by a concert review to remain unselfconscious.

So I avoid such practices. I do concert reviews much later on, when all the dust has settled. Then I can listen and watch and be far more balanced in my assessments.

What I have done in the past evening is take the concert footage that was made for me of both performances, are streamed it into the computer. I have only watched enough of the video to do the editing required to trim it down to manageable size to fit onto a DVD. I have only listened to enough excerpts to make sure the audio was clear, clean, and of good quality. (Which it is.) I edited the raw footage down, made the titles, and set the file to render. Then I walked away from the computer and let it churn. Since this is a long piece of music, and I have two concerts to edit down to DVD length—which I am doing for the sake of documentation, not for commercial release; no more than that at this point, so don't ask me when it will be available, I don't know—I did the editing work, and set the files to render. When they're done rendering, I'll build the DVDs. That will take a few more days. Big concert files can take all day and night to render.

People keep asking me, How did the concerts go?! Where they a big success?! People genuinely want to know, because they really do care, and support my success as a composer and writer.

I feel like a heel for saying so, but the truth is: How the hell should I know? For one thing, I'm far too close to the events themselves to be objective yet. For another thing, I was far too crazy with stress going in to the concerts to do anything more than get through them, absorb what happened, and set it aside for later appreciation and thoughtfulness. Lots of good things were said to me, and about me. I appreciate them all—and at the same time, they don't at the moment feel like they have anything to do with me. I am too close to things to really know what's real and what's fantasy. I do myself no service by collapsing into some belief in my own genius, or allowing my ego to be inflated by praise to the point where I lose my balance and my objectivity both.

So I don't really know how the concerts went. I am not able to answer that as yet. I hope that they were a big success, and I feel that they probably were. As with all things, time will tell. Meanwhile, I have lots of work to do on the next phase of the process, as we prepare to record the music in the studio, and then take it to the GALA conference in Denver a few weeks later.

Many friends and family all said the concerts went extremely well, and so did some total strangers. I got a lot of very positive commentary afterwards. Many people said they really loved the work. And while we were performing, there were some moments when we could see audience members in tears. They were obviously moved by the performance, which pleases me greatly.

The thing you have to remember is: everyone in this audience wanted us to succeed. They support us, they support me, and that's wonderful! Nonetheless, it will probably be some time before I can be genuinely objective about this experience. Am I grateful? Beyond what words can say. Am I hoping to do more? Yes indeed.

Meanwhile, all I can say is that I'm incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to write this large choral work, and to have been commissioned to do so. I'm incredibly grateful to all involved who made it happen; to all who attended; especially for family and friends who drove or flew thousands of miles just to be here for the concert premieres; and to all who sent their well-wishes even though they could not attend. This has been a major positive force in my life, these past months. And this is only the beginning. There will be other performances of Heartlands to come. and other new commissions to compose and write. I look forward to all of that, and I will be eternally grateful to all concerned for every aspect of this experience that has carried through my life for many months now. It's just the beginning. I have a long list of things to do, next, now that this concert series is complete, and the next phase begins.

Thank you all. Someday I'll talk more about how I felt about the concerts, before, during, and after. But not for at least a few more days.

Heartlands: Rehearsal & Performance

Well into the rehearsal period of Heartlands, the large choral work I was commissioned to write last year, and which will be premiered in June, it's fascinating to watch how the rehearsal process is developing. Even if I have any special insight into the score, having written it, I have been surprised a few times with the ways things have developed.

One fascinating aspect of the completed score in rehearsal is that there are a few pieces which look daunting at first but in fact are easy to learn and perform. And there a few pieces that seemed easy at first but are hard to learn. The latter especially among the pieces for solo voice and piano. People seem to be afraid of one or two of these songs, in so far as no one is rushing forward to audition for them. There is still time to cajole people into taking a leap and trying these pieces; nonetheless it provokes some momentary anxiety in a composer who wants to get the best performance possible of his work.

I'm well aware that I "held back" at times from writing music more complex than might have been, that I restrained myself from over-writing and showing off as an artist. I've written before how it's essential in writing songs not to over-write—a tendency many poets fall into when the first begin to write song lyrics. Stephen Sondheim warns against this tendency in his two recently published books of Collected Lyrics, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. One of the chief values of those books is Sondheim's commentaries, wherein he shows you where he succeeded in following his own dictums of clarity and simplicity, and where he failed. That's a lesson I took to my heart at the very beginning of the commission writing process.

The same is also true for writing music. It's always tempting to pull out all the stops and write to the edge of your ability as composer or performer. That's a good thing to do when you're challenging yourself as an artist to grow a little bit more. But when you are commissioned to write music for a specific ensemble, no matter what that ensemble is, you do better to take into account the skills and abilities and needs of the musicians who are going to be performing the work. When I wrote Heartlands, because I knew the Chorus well, I had a pretty clear sense where I could stretch and push them and challenge them, and where it would be counterproductive to do so.

You have to find that dynamic balance where the music is fresh and lively and challenging, and fun to learn and perform, balanced against music that is so difficult no one wants to try it. You want to work along that fine line between their familiar comfort zone, and sometimes get them to stretch a bit. (Years ago, when I was writing three art-songs for a singer and pianist who I knew could perform anything well, I "pulled out all the stops" and really pushed the edges of technique and expression. Yet, since I don't believe in technique for its own sake, but that craft is in service to expression, I wrote musical gestures intended to support the mood of the lyrics. These "Three Songs" were well-received, and I learned an early lesson in finding that balance already discussed.)

I've become aware of this balance again in the rehearsal process, as some people find themselves unwilling to audition for some of the solo songs. I expected that, I just hope people will take the risk and go for it anyway. That's how you grow as a musician, whether you're a singer or pianist or whatever: you take some risks.

That's also how you grow as a person. When I was commissioned to write Heartlands, and I received the commission because I can write music in varying styles and tones and emotions, I knew that this music would be a journey. Not just for me, but for the singers in the Chorus who gave me their stories to make into music. I knew that they would experience hearing their life-stories refracted back to them as art. I hoped that some of them would feel enlivened by seeing their life-stories from a new perspective, and that would open doors. (I am well aware of the possibilities in music performance for healing, therapy, and growth. I have experienced this myself, many times, and I have been told by some listeners that they get that from some of my other music.)

So I've been encouraging singers to go for it, whenever they've come up to me with questions or concerns. I've told some individual singers privately that I'm glad to see them stretching themselves. And I've been open about my hopes for the overall performance, premiere, and continued life of this large new choral work that I've written. Hopes, not expectations—I've been very clear to make that distinction. I have very high hopes for the long haul for this music; this entire composition and rehearsal period has been one of the most positive things in my life.

While I "held back" at times in the large choral movements, knowing that what I wanted to write should be easy to learn, and memorize, and integrate into one's performance, I also "let myself go" in some of the solo voice and piano movements. I didn't write anything so "modern" that it would be too hard to learn, given the length of the rehearsal period, but I did know where and how I wanted to stretch the performers, to challenge them to a higher level of performance, that I knew they could achieve even if they do not. I reserved some of the more difficult piano writing for these moments in the overall score. Where you find some pianistic writing that is outside the box, where the piano part becomes more than accompaniment and takes on a role as equal, that's where you'll find some of these moments intended to encourage everyone to push themselves a little bit further, a little bit outside their comfort zones. I hope to hear eventually from some performers that those moments where they were being asked to step outside their comfort zones were, in the end, moments of revelation. And I have already received a few comments along those lines.

Remember, music is written not only for the audience, but for the performers. I want the singers to have fun, and to immerse themselves fully in the experience of performing a large-scale, sometimes challenging choral work. Nothing has pleased me more than when a singer has come up to me after rehearsal and told me how much they liked a moment, or a whole piece.

For Heartlands I have intentionally written pieces that are purely lush and beautiful harmonies, because that style suits the mood of the text. (In the end, its all about matching the mood of the words and music as closely as possible.) I have intentionally written pieces that are more edgy, at times openly angry, with more aggressive harmonic styles. I have written pieces that are more traditional forms, dance forms, folk song forms, inspirational ballads. And I have written pieces that are more contemporary, more "modern" in style and execution. (Also, where I've written the more contemporary styles, I've given lots of musical cues to the singers from the piano and from the other voice parts, so that the alert singer will never get lost.)

People think writing music for me ought to be easy—and on one level it is. It can be very easy to come up with an idea, or to find inspiration where I need it; and I have some facility as an improvising musician. I remember what jazz legend Lester Bowie said once about music: he said he has a permanent 24-hour soundtrack always playing in the back of his mind, a ribbon of music that is playing the entire time he is awake; he said that when he played, composed or improvised, all he had to do was dip into his permanent back-of-the-mind soundtrack, and bring that music forward into audibility, so that others could hear it, too. I experience improvising and composing music this way, myself. I think it's one reason that, unlike many other classically-trained musicians, I have no fear of improvisation; I have faith the music will always be there. I can always write music, whether notated or spontaneous, because what I do is a lot like Lester Bowie described for his own process.

Yet it takes time to write music down, to notate a score, to fill in all the edges, then to go back over the score and adjust it where necessary. I'm discovering that writing a song takes less time than to write, for example, a multi-movement solo piano work, but it still takes time. It took me ten months to write Heartlands, actually only nine months if you recall that I lost a month in the middle of the commission period to surgery and recovery.

What this means is that writing music is both easy and hard, it is as natural as breathing yet it also requires a lot of effort. And the same is true for performing music: It's as natural as breathing, and can require a lot of effort.

When I was sitting at my writing desk, notating the final pencil scores of Heartlands, I thought about this a lot. It was not separate from my awareness at all times of the level of difficulty of performance I was demanding from the singers. I was aware throughout the writing process of my desire to push the singers a little bit past their comfort zones—but not too far. I was aware all the time of how to both write an interesting line, and how to make it singable without being harder than was really necessary.

•

As a performer, who will be singing with the Chorus for the premiere of Heartlands, I find myself this week at that stage in my own memorization process where some of the music is playing in my head all the time, as the dominant element of my permanent 24-hour internal soundtrack. Hearing the music that I'm learning play in my mind is a familiar and welcome stage of the process of learning music for me, one I've relied on for decades. When I hear the music playing in my head all the time, like now, that means it's sinking in and I'm partially into the process of memorization. I'm a very visual person, so one way that I memorize music scores is to memorize them as visual pages; there are times when I actually read the printed page in my mind's eye during performance. Having the music play in my head, and singing along with it in my mind, is by contrast an aural memorization process. For best results I synergize the visual and aural memory/learning processes.

I know I have a piece thoroughly memorized when the visual and aural channels begin to merge with the kinesthetic channel, and I begin to feel a piece of music in my guts, in my bones, in my very blood chemistry. It goes into my muscle memory, which is a far deeper memory than the merely intellectual. When I have learned a piece of music that thoroughly, I never forget it. I might not come back and play a piece learned this way for many years, but it's still in there, and I don't need more than a glance at the score to get it back in my functional memory. I've learned over the years to rely on muscle memory for this, as well: the body remembers the sensations on all levels of detail that making this music require one to feel inside one's own flesh. Even when the mind goes blank, the body remembers.

First Flutes

Since I began playing flutes, some 30 years ago, I have focused on ethnic flutes, especially bamboo flutes. I own a concert flute, a glass flute, a jade flute, flutes made of various hardwoods, and several dozen bamboo flutes. I specialize in suling, from Indonesia, and shakuhachi, from Japan. I don't claim to be a virtuoso flute player, as I am primarily self-taught, with the occasional guidance from more professional players. I play well enough for my own purposes: music for meditation, for ambient music, for my own compositions for flute and other instruments.

Playing flute for myself, I find it to be an instrument that calms and centers me, based as it is on the breath, the prana, qi, ki.

This is my first flute:



Not the first flute I ever owned, which was a flute of lesser quality that was a gift from a relative. This is the first flute I ever bought for myself, and which I taught myself to play. It has shown up on more than one recording over the years.



It's a large instrument, sounding in the alto flute range, with limited pitch range, a unique tuning, and very sensitive to breath pressure. It's called a Zen Flute, and was made by John Niemi in Hawai'i, in the early 1980s. I have three or four bamboo flutes made by John Niemi, all of superb quality, and all possessing a soul, an earth spirit. That's not just my opinion; other players and listeners have made similar comments to me, unsolicited.

In December 2011, when I was commissioned to record a new CD to be used for meditation, yoga, Reiki, and/or massage, which I titled Darshan, this flute was one I wanted to use on the recording. But I couldn't find it anywhere. I tore the house apart looking for it. I looked all through the studio, all over the basement, I looked in travel bags from my last camping trip last year. I thought with horror that it had somehow been lost, that I would never see it again. I had given up hope. I went ahead with the recording project, and was well satisfied with the music I was making, but there was a hole where this old friend had been.

Just this past week, it was returned to me. I had last used it on a recording project at the studio in Chicago, when I was living out in California, and in the turbulence of recent years I had lost track of it. Without remembering, I had left it in Chicago intending to record more with it later. My friend found it when he was cleaning out his place in Chicago, a few months ago, and had been waiting for the right time to return it to me, along with a half dozen other flutes all bundled together.

Having this flute given back to me is the best thing that's happened to me all month. It's like being reborn. Now that I have my Zen Flute again, I can hardly wait to make new music with it. I have plans to record more music for meditation, yoga, etc., and this flute will be featured prominently, you may be sure.

Here are the first two flutes I ever bought for myself:



Alongside the Zen Flute is my first shakuhachi. (Japanese end-blown flute, with a long and important musical tradition to its name.) It's a rough-hewn example of the breed, also made by John Niemi. This shakuhachi is featured prominently on Darshan, appearing on several tracks. It's my first shakuhachi, and even though I have acquired other shakuhachi of officially better quality, this instrument has a special place in my heart.



Here are several of my best-quality bamboo flutes, including three shakuhachi:



Three of these flutes were just returned me on the aforementioned occasion. The evening after I was reunited with these flutes, I spent a fair amount of time playing, caressing, just getting reacquainted. To have them all back again is inspirational. I am finding new music in them, each voice being as fresh as if never heard before. It's been long enough that I am rediscovering each old friend with great pleasure.



I spent some time tonight just getting to know all these flutes again, looking for new melodies. Each of them will appear on the next recording project, and I'll be sure that they are not parted from me again.



The three shakuhachi above grouped for a family portrait:



Making these photographic portraits of some of my favorite flutes from among my collection of musical instruments was an exercise in more than one photographic technique. All of these were made using a tripod and long exposures, with directional lighting from more than one source. It was a late-night photo session made in celebration of their return. These are all relatively long exposures. I used narrow depth of field to create the close-ups, desiring to emphasize the parts of the flutes where the mouth is placed, where the breath gives life to the music. One or two of the resulting images are iconic enough to be enlarged to poster size, and printed as decoration for the recording studio walls.

Songwriting: Performance Milestones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal milestones are individual.

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

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

Tony Levin on Stick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improvised Music Outdoors

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



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



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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance excerpts:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, excerpt 1    

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, excerpt 2    

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

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

Folk Music: Against the Hit Parade

Pete Seeger wrote the following in 1956. It was true then, and it's still true today. Possibly even more true now than it was then, because the technology by which music is made, distributed, shared, and listened to has kept evolving, and changing at a rapid rate. The record companies have now lost their bootheel-n-the-throat control of music production and distribution, which is the good side of the current technological miracle; the bad side is of course that those same record companies, in their flailing about to try to maintain their dissolving monopoly, have become vicious about trying to keep that monopoly, while at the same time producing an endless stream of newly-hatched, overly-produced, hype-marketed, vapid, cheap and tawdry, hollow, talentless pop stars (is Lady Gaga, the latest incarnation of Madonna and/or Marilyn Manson, a postmodern commentary on this trend or herself part of it, or both?)—most of whom have been influenced by Pete Seeger without probably ever hearing his name. Seeger's influence on folk and pop music remains incredibly strong, and his opinions, even his older ones, are still worth listening to:

I am against the Hit Parade because I am against anything that would make a sheep out of a human being. The world is too big, and its people too varied, to try and make one hit parade suit us all. True, the gods of mass production may proclaim that it is much cheaper, much more efficient, to produce everyone's music at one place and at one time. But which would you rather hear—cheap music or good music? (And by good you might mean anything from Calypso to blues to Bach.)

Not only every country, but every region and town, every national group, every age group, every industry, even every school or summer camp should have its own hit parade, refusing to follow slavishly the dictates of Hollywood and New York.

Fortunately, at the same time that TV has concentrated the entertainment business as never before, LPs [and now CDs and MP3s] have enabled hundreds of minority idioms to receive hearings. The so-called Hit Parade is, today, simply the most popular songs of the fourteen-to-eighteen age group, and is supported by them and a few saloon goers who help feed the jukeboxes. There have been many songs which have attained Number One on the Hit Parade, yet 75 percent of the population have never heard of them.

Another way to think about this is a parallel slogan from artist/shaman/astrologer/writer Rob Brezsny, who says: Performance is life. Entertainment is death. Entertainment, which is what the music industry tries to reduce music to, both to sanitize it and make it harmless and control it, and also to try to own it financially, is passive; entertainment is you not making your own art, but only taking in the art made for you by others. Produced for you by artists and musicians and writers who the arts industry has laughingly begun to call "content providers." As if the purpose of making art was only to sell it, to provide content to be sold. Thus goes the final decadent stages of the commercialization of creativity under what another contemporary radical philosopher has called Too-Late Capitalism.

Entertainment is ultimately deadening because it is passive. You are expected to be a passive consumer sucking at the teat of a centralized delivery system. (That's the paradigm that the five big worldwide music industry conglomerates are so desperately trying to hold onto.) Performance, by contrast, is enlivening because you do it yourself. You pull out the banjo, or the piano, or you go to choir rehearsal, and you make acoustic live music with other mostly-untrained people who are making music for their lives, their souls, and their health. (Which of course is one definition of "folk music" that Pete Seeger would agree with.) Performance is active, it's do-it-yourself, it's wild and anarchic and often very rough around the edges: folk music, in a word, which is music made by regular folk. Entertainment is very slick and over-produced, and slides down the gullet like teflon-coated candy. Performance, on the other hand, is often full of little rough edges and errors, those details that make it come alive. Put another way, performance exists where people who make music (or art) understand: Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Slick, perfectly-recorded, perfectly-packaged entertainment is deadening. Rough-edged folk music makes your heart beat as well as your feet.

Think about it. This is all tied into what Pete Seeger was talking about 50 years ago now.

(Hat tip to Swanee, who sent me a copy of Pete Seeger's The Incompleat Folksinger, ed. by Jo Metcalf Schwartz.)

Ballad

Ballad by Salvatore Martirano.
David Barick, bass-baritone



Video editing and compositing, effects, etc. by AD.

David Barick is my excellent brother-in-law, a professional musician, former singer with the Nederlaans Kammerkoor.

No, that isn't a picture of David. Just some incredibly disturbed-looking singer found on the Internet. All the X-Files acid green elements were added by me.

Digitizing Vinyl

The past few days, I finally got started on a long-intended project: recording some of my old vinyl LP records into digital audio files on one of my computers. I connected a turntable up to my previous laptop (retired when I got the new one, but still useful for this), wiped a lot of data off the old drive to make room, and started recording. I've transcribed about a half dozen favorite old LPs that I have not listened to for at least ten years, and haven't really had the physical means to listen to for half that time. The past few years when I've been on the road a lot, carrying heavy stereo equipment has been abandoned in favor of portable gear like an iPod, a laptop computer, a case of CDs, and a set of computer speakers.

When I closed down my parents' home after they died, I kept my father's old stereo equipment, which at one point in time had been very high-end. My father and my uncle were both audiophiles. They both were willing to invest a lot of time and money into their sound equipment. For example, a Nakamichi 700 cassette tape deck; a Phase Linear 4000 receiver; really good AR speakers, etc. I grew up around high-end audio gear, and also reading my father's monthly audiophile magazines, like High Fidelity. I learned a great deal about recording and reproduction technology before I was in college; later in life, I've spent a lot of time in the recording studio, both as an engineer and as a recording artist. In high school, I got involved with the audio-visual department. I made videos with the other students, and recorded tapes for radio. I was part of the team that read the daily announcements on the school's PA system, a daily five-minute "radio" broadcast of sorts. Not long after I graduated from high school and started college, I got my FCC Radiooperator's License, which I still have, and got involved with programming and hosting community radio. I viewed radio as another means of performance, and with a collaborator or two made several experimental radiopieces that ranged from very avant-grade live performances to mixups of LPs and cassettes and reel to reel tapes that were composed for radio. I have most of that material on cassette, recorded live off the broadcast feed. And I have a high-end cassette player also hooked up to the studio computer, and am digitizing those cassettes, as well.

One of these radiopieces was Bottle Music, made with my regular music partner Stuart Hinds. (Follow the link for a couple of excerpts to listen to.)

Another was a piece I made entirely in the radio station production rooms, and in the University of Michigan's Electronic Music Studio, a stone flute. This piece consisted of poetic texts with soundscape, inspired in part by my reading of Jerome Rothenberg's seminal anthologies of what came to be called ethnopoetics, Shaking the Pumpkin and These anthologies for the first time ever treated the oral poetries and songs of indigenous peoples from many cultures as legitimate poetic traditions, equal artistically and literarily to our own Euro-American fine art literature. Rothenberg has continued this interest over the years, and remains one of our most important editors of large poetry anthologies.

Here is a stone flute in its entirety (about half an hour long), if you care to listen:

a stone flute    

Stuart Hinds, reader; AD, soundscapes, processing, production

Some of the vinyl LPs I am digitizing first are ones I want to listen to again, after not having heard them for many years. Others are more abstract music, and avant-garde music, that likewise I hadn't heard for awhile, but also were sources I used as elements for some of those radiopieces. It's been fun to listen to them, again, as I record them into the old laptop. It brings back memories of the live on-air mixing we sometimes had to do in complex ways, in order to combine sources into our live-broadcast radiopieces.

A lot of my favorite LPs have never been re-released on CD. This is true of much of the avant-garde music I acquired over the years on LP. But it's also true of some classical performances (although these are more likely to be reissued than are other genres), some jazz, some folk music, and a lot of rare recordings of ethnic music. Smithsonian/Folkways has reissued on CD a number of the old Nonesuch Explorer series of recordings of folk music from around the world—recordings I treasured all through college and grad school—but not all of them. Some are only reissued in excerpts, some not at all.

So digitizing a lot of my rare and unusual vinyl is a project that will be ongoing for some time. I will be digging into it all winter, as I will be sorting and organizing other materials, for a proposed major garage sale next spring. After I've digitized many of these old LPs, I will be letting go of the actual physical LP; there are antiquarian collectors and enthusiasts who no doubt will be interested in some of these.

But in digitizing some of those favorite LPs over the past few days I realized as well that I do want to keep some of them. The most important to me; the most rare and unusual. This will be a small minority of the overall collection, maybe only one or two racks. But these few LPs remain valuable to me, personally, as works of music, of unusual sounds, of rare recordings. Once digitized, I might not listen to the LP directly any more, but the liner notes, the included booklets, the multi-media materials that some artists explored in the 70s and 80s: those will be worth keeping, to consult for notes, and to continue to use for future inspiration.

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(Further examples of my own original music can be listened to via the Music page of my website.)

Avant-Garde Music Etc.

My roots as a composer are with the mid-Twentieth-Century avant-garde. I studied directly with some of its leading lights, and more often with some of its secondary influences. So I have a direct lineage to the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, to the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and to other branches of sound exploration, tape music, and so forth. I studied with George Cacioppo, and knew many of the other composers involved with the mid-century avant-garde. I still default to this music, at least in attitude, when time and opportunity allow. In many ways it's my "home plate" as a composer, even though a lot of the music I compose these days is far more "inside the box." Well, if you write to commission, you don't always get the chance to be adventurous.

it's bitterly cold right now, well below freezing. I am wrapped up in blankets, still feeling the chill, trying to stay warm. I've been listening to music by Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and others. I've been editing sounds and music tracks on my laptop as I sit curled up on the couch in layers of blankets.

I am rambling through my memories of the avant-garde musical soundscape. This is a random walk, with no purpose, and far from complete.

This was all brought back to me by recent readings in the history of mid-20th-C. music, and some related topics. And from memories that have been surfacing, of the time I first lived in Madison, WI.

I've been involved in community radio since 1980, when I first got my FCC license. I've had my own Road Journal podcast since 2004, which I tend to view as akin to radio programming. Granted, the podcast veers all over the map, there's a lot of musical and sound experiments on it, as well as readings from my Road Journal; still, it had a pretty substantial listenership when it was mostly spoken word, those first two or three early years. My late-night radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, WI, which I had for 7 years, featured the most difficult avant-garde and challenging music available on record, and had a Nielsen rating of 11 percent of the total local market. I also regularly broadcast live improvised music, made in the production studio, and live mixes of pre-recorded sources.

I broadcast a lot of quality literary and radio drama recordings on my show, ranging from Samuel Beckett plays for radio to John Cage's ROARATORIO and William S. Burroughs reading Naked Lunch on CD, and these always received a lot of positive calls from the listeners. (The only time I ever got in trouble was when a housewife complained about my playing Allen Ginsberg's reading of Howl on the air; I mixed it with live music, namely my Stick set up in the in production studio, leaning against the speaker, and "howling" with continuous feedback; I used that as the background to Ginsberg reading several other poems along with Howl. I gathered later that the complaint was because the housewife was surprised, although I was in truth broadcasting during the FCC "safe harbor" night hours. Nothing ever came of the incident.) And my show always exceeded its goal during pledge drives. I also regularly played syndicated radio spoken-word programs like Ken Nordine's Word Jazz (which now has its own podcast) and the series New American Radio, which included a fair bit of avant-garde radio drama (and which I see one can now listen to again online).

Today I am also thinking of a performance I saw in Madison of the full-length dance piece choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Still/Here. The dancers in the ensemble for this piece were mostly ordinary folks, not professional dancers. There were lots of "non-dancer" bodies onstage. One of the dancers onstage had a body type like me own: tall and blocky and large around the middle; he moved with grace and power, often serving as the fulcrum or center around which other dancers moved. I found this dance concert incredibly empowering, something I will never forget. I had been studying for some time by then modern dance, with Ellen Moore, contact improvisation, and the martial arts Tai Chi Chuan and Ki Aikido.

It was a fertile time in Madison for me: also a time of much self-exploration. I met lots of established thinkers and avant-garde artists, people who had moved and shaken the creative world. I was involved in the local music scene as a musician, a photographer, and a writer of concert, music, album, and dance reviews. I was a music journalist, who also played music. I got to see a lot of amazing concerts; and I got to participate in some, too.

To be continued.

The New Piano Music

I have always been more of a composer than performer. I was able, during my pianist career, which began at age 6 and lasted into college, to perform competently. But my emphasis was never on Playing The Classics, or being a Great Performer.

When I was in music school, there was often a gap between the performance majors and the composers. Many of the composers were also gifted performers, on a wide range of instruments. But the performance majors didn't compose—except for exercises in theory classes, which were usually about writing in the style of tonal music from the 18th or 19th centuries. I wrote my own share of learning-pieces in theory classes, including faux-Bach, faux-Mozart, faux-Debussy, faux-Stravinsky pieces. Those are all études, meant to learn something from doing, but not in themselves to be considered as actual music. Musical, but not music. Some of this is a matter of intent, of course.

But the main gap between the composers and the performance majors was a simple emphasis. It can be defined, crudely, as the difference between creation and re-creation.

Performance majors I knew, many of them gifted and remarkable talents, did not usually consider themselves as creative. I disagree. I reframe that to say that their creative efforts went into interpreting the masters, into re-creating existing compositions. Most performance majors when I went to music school were not improvisers: jazz classes were not part of the curriculum at that time. Some few performers were improvisers, but it was because they loved to play jazz, and picked up gigs outside of school. This has changed now, as there are many music school that include jazz and even rock in their curricula. It's not just classical music anymore in music school.

Performing, or re-creating a composer's intent in the printed score, is not a matter simply of playing the notes. Performance requires interpretation. Matters of tempo, phrasing, pauses, subtle variations in feeling—these are all aspects of interpretation. If performing music were only a matter of mechanical re-creation, then anybody could do it and it would always sound good. But there's a reason Artur Rubinstein was beloved for his Chopin interpretations: they carried the heart and soul of the music, not just the notes.

So I view interpretation as a species of creativity. It's not obvious, and it's not overt, and many classical performers would quibble with me. Nonetheless, since I view creativity as an infinite resource in all aspects of life, I find it here as well.

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I have mixed feelings about recorded music.

One or two great composers of the twentieth century opined that recorded music was lifeless next to going to a concert. John Cage told a story in which he was at a concert of Beethoven symphonies. A little boy sitting in front of him objected to his parents, "But that's not the way it's supposed to go! It's not like on the record!" This is amusing, but it also speaks to idea that recorded music conditions our ears with expectations that are often not met in live performance. We get used to a certain glossy perfection. Glenn Gould, the perfectionist pianist, used the recording studio to create perfected performances of Bach that even he could not perform live. Recordings of John Cage pieces fix in place a single performance of music that is meant to be ever-changing, never performed exactly the same way twice, and open to chance.

Nonetheless I treasure my collection of recordings of Cage's music.

I am in fact a highly experienced and qualified recording engineer. I know my way around the tools of the recording studio. I did a lot of tape music during and after college. I know how to splice using a razorblade (and believe you me, digital editing is a major improvement on the old tools). I have actually used reel to reel tape to master recordings of my tape pieces and performed compositions. (Most of these I have already transferred to digital media, or am in the process of transferring.) I still work occasionally in a recording studio, and I have a computer-based recording studio in my spare room at home.

We always work with the best tools we have available. When better tools are developed, musicians on the leading edge always migrate towards using them.

And yet there is nothing like a live performance.

In a live performance, you often hear the musicians breathing—and breath is an essential element of interpretation. When you hear a string quartet breathing as one right before and after a difficult ensemble passage, you are given audible evidence of the kind of unitary empathy that chamber music creates alike in performers and audience. Breath is life. Breath is timing. Breath is what connects us all. The masters of meditation speak of the breath in the same way that the masters of music performance do: it is what gives us life, and the discipline of mastering the breath is what gives us the ability to go beyond our own limits.

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Musicians who are dominantly performers are specialists. They train as hard as doctors or lawyers, often for many more hours, many more years. They often have the physical tone of trained athletes, as well, as playing a musical instrument is a somatic experience, not a purely aural or mental one. I know brass players (french horn, trumpet, etc.) who could probably do push-ups with their lips.

When I was a boy, I had severe respiratory illnesses many times; I even ended up with bronchitis in the hospital at age 11, in an oxygen tent, sleeping sitting up so I wouldn't drown in my own pneumonia. Singing in choirs and learning to play flutes, over the next dozen or so years, were what gave me my breath back. I still am prone to respiratory illness, I get them more easily than most; but I have a discipline of breathing that helps me get through, now, thanks to music. Meditating for many years also helped.

A trained musical performer is a highly skilled person. They have to be able to do several things at the same time. They must coordinate physical exertions and muscle memory with hearing, cognition, and reading and memorizing specialized notation.

I sing in a men's chorus right now in which I am one of the most highly trained musicians; some of the men don't even read music notation well, but learn by ear and by listening to their compatriots. The result is a good choral group with a good choral sound. We all come from different skill levels in music. I occasionally forget this, and get a blank stare when I start talking theory.

The problem is that these highly-trained, incredibly talented, strongly motivated people often can't earn a living doing what they love doing best: playing music. We live in a culture that devalues all things artistic, because they are not obviously profit-motivated or economically-oriented. But music is a gift we couldn't live without. A healthy musical culture is one mark of the health of a civilization.

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We do live right now in an artistically decadent, mannerist culture. We live in a culture where there is a severe disconnect between popular forms of entertainment, and forms of making fine art that have become insular and mannerist. Your average listener doesn't care about new music—except that commercial pop music is driven by novelty, by the cult of personality and celebrity, and by the profit motive. It's a contradiction: most listeners refuse to listen to music by living composers—unless they're pop music songwriters.

"New music" is something most listeners avoid.

That's too bad.

There are some neo-romantic composers out there writing new music that is very conventional, very unsurprising, very easy on the ears, not hard to follow, full of good hummable tunes and melodies, and full of memorable moments. Some of these composers are popular Broadway composers, with strings of successful hit shows and hit songs. Let's face it, though: Broadway as an industry is highly romantic. It caters, sometimes panders, to the common denominator. It borrows a lot from literature. It can be tremendous fun. But it's not very challenging. Broadway musicals rarely ask you to change your life. If they inspire you to do so, it's because you yourself have found a resonance point between you and the Broadway musical.

Of course music can change your life.

But any music can change your life. The danger lies in thinking that some kinds of music cannot, simply because you are not immediately attracted to them, or they don't speak to you. Yet music that is too challenging is no longer entertainment. What provokes, provokes life.

But entertainment isn't about life: it's about simulations of life. Rob Breszny's band World Entertainment War formulates this as the slogan: Performance is life. Entertainment is death. Entertainment is a passive re-creation of sentimental nostalgia for the genuinely-lived life. Because entertainment is passive, exercise-less and inactive, it doesn't feed the mind and body, it deadens them. The land of the entertained couch potato is the realm of the already-dead.

Commercial pop is not new music: it's recycled, dead music. It may be marketed as fresh and new, but compare to last year's novelties, and you see it's just more of the same. Nothing has really changed. The essence of mannerist entertainment is that it contains no new ideas, only the deadly repetition of old ones. What appears to be innovation is only variation of what has gone before. A new "reality TV" show is like every other one already in existence; content doesn't matter, only format and presentation. Nothing is more unreal than "reality TV."

Mannerist entertainment such as commercial pop music, because it is driven by market economics rather than by any creative force of innovation, keeps recycling the same tropes. They are presented as fresh each news cycle, but with rare exceptions they are simply remixes of what has already been known to sell well. Commercial pop music as a business is inherently conservative. It has no real desire to nurture innovation or exploration, because it's main goal is to sell the music. Experimentation always risks being unpopular and not selling. What music industry corporation would truly want to risk that? The recording companies that do push the envelope artistically are in the minority.

New music can push against conservative recycling and mannerism. You have to let it, though. You have to be open enough to its possibilities, even to its baffling complexities which may seem obscure and incomprehensible at first. New music often requires you to stick with it, to get to eventual rewards. There is always a risk that the time you invest in educating yourself about new music might not pay off. So if you're content with what you already know you like, why bother seeking out the new? Most listeners don't.

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My own new music has been called dissonant and difficult. It's actually not that dissonant; it's just that it's not regressive neo-romantic ear-candy with easy predictable chords and pretty melodies. I do like to use more complex and interesting musical ideas in my new music, because when I write I'm also writing for myself. Yet I am capable of writing to commission in the style the client wants. And a large part of my new music is accessible even to new listeners, even though it is based on modal and non-Western styles. I can "write pretty." I just don't all the time.

My music is not atonal, as I don't write serial compositions. I actually have no use for classic serial twelve-tone technique, which I regard as an artistic dead-end. As such, it is quite parallel to contemporary mannerist poetry that is all about manipulating the materials in a context free of meaning. If all notes have equal value, if all words have equal value, then none do. The lowest common denominator of pre-packaged pop music and the extremes of ivory-tower academic classical music have this in common: they're both about nothing. They may be sensational, but the triumph of mannerism is the triumph of style over substance.

It ceaselessly amazes me how poorly this is understood: style can never replace substance, where there is none.

Style in a vacuum is a dead-end. Style exists to reveal substance, it cannot stand on its own. As fond as I am of sweet desserts, you can't live on them. Pre-packaged, over-produced, synthetically-performed pop music is all style; it has no heart. You can make it into the soundtrack of your life, if you choose, but what kind of life is that? A default life. A life lived vicariously. The cult of celebrity and the packaging of popular entertainment are closely linked in form and in practice: both are entertainment, neither are about you living your own life. You end up living someone else's life, never your own. Or you live your life For another, rather than for yourself.

Advertising is all lies.

It creates needs that don't exist. American advertising, compared to European advertising, is heavily fear-mongering. Fear of germs, fear of bad breath, fear of disease and mortality, fear of not being cool, fear of not fitting in at your workplace—these are all the tools of advertising. And they are also the tools of political campaigns, which are actually marketing campaigns. Campaign ads are often designed to make you afraid to vote for the other guy. And campaign ads lie as often as do commercial product ads.

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Whatever you think you know about new music, whatever brief encounter you might have had with a piece of new music that soured your taste for all new music, whatever belief you have that composers don't care about their audiences: you're wrong.

The problem is, composers like other artists are always fighting an uphill battle. Against ignorance, against willful miseducation, against the idea that high culture and low pop culture can never meet and have nothing to say to each other. There has always been a strain of virulent anti-intellectualism in American culture, especially in political discourse, and when it comes near the arts it tends to be proud of its ignorance and lack of understanding. Why else would politicians attack something they don't really understand? Of course, politics too is entertainment, more style than substance. Mark Twain said that a century ago, and nothing has substantially changed.

in new music, there are two urges a composer must balance: The urge to write whatever they want, whatever they hear inside that they want to make happen, the urge to explore a direction in the music as far as can take them; and, the urge to have an audience, the desire to be heard, the desire to have musical ensembles actually perform your music.

It's one thing for write only for yourself, or your own band, or to do solo work in a recording studio, where you play all the parts and the music is all your own. It's another thing to be commissioned to write a large scale new work for an orchestra or other performing ensemble. You have to balance those urges.

Mostly I write whatever the hell I want. BUt here's the paradox: Almost all of my composed chamber music, in which I wrote whatever the hell I wanted to write, were commissions. They were for the most part commissions by performers who wanted me to write for them. In most cases, they had heard my other new music, liked what they heard, and asked me to write a piece for them.

I got all the way through music school, writing several new pieces a year, and only two of those were not commissions. (I don't count the études and other little throwaway pieces, many of which were exercises rather than finished works.) I occasionally stumbled. one or two pieces I wish I could rewrite now, and one I have in fact revised. But every piece I composed at that time in my life got performed, sometimes more than once. I have recorded performances of most of them.

Now I find myself with a piano again, wanting to compose again, wanting to sit down and notate again. I'm submitting my existing compositions to contests to by chosen for commissions for new works. (An occasionally dismaying process.) I'm writing new piano music, and choral music. I want to write more.

Here's the hinge of the balance: I write new music because I want to, because I can, because I must. It is as essential to me as breathing. It's great when other people like it, too. And it's okay when they don't.

If you don't like new music, you don't know what you're missing. And if you give it a try and still don't like it, you can always go back to that other stuff.