To Hear and Hear Again

I first heard Nixon in China my sophomore year of high school. A friend of mine had been turned on to John Adams's Harmonielehre thru one of the Civilization video games, and found the opera at our town's library. She insisted that I listen to it, and it wasn't long before I had memorized the exact rhythm of Nixon's sputtering "News!"s and the chorus's pitter-patter of "pig"s (start at 3'35"). I listened to the entire opera dozens of times, and entered the entire libretto into iTunes by hand.

My freshling year in college, the Metropolitan Opera staged the work, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the simulcast. I dragged along a friend and excitedly talked about it with him during the intermissions. My then bassoon teacher opined that he really only liked one scene from each of the acts, and I boggled. Wasn't the whole thing great?

And then I just kind of . . . stopped.

Oh, I kept listening to Adams, and occasionally I'd recommend Nixon to someone looking for accessible 20th-Century operas. I read Adams's autobiography, and I greatly expanded my knowledge of the Minimalist and post-Minimalist repertoire. I took formal courses in music history and filled in the more modern stretches on my own time (our history curriculum ended around 1950. I have . . . a lot of feelings about this, but I'm going to save them for another day.). But I stopped listening to the work itself. According to my iTunes library, the last time I did so was on the ninth of August, 2012.

Fast forward two years. I couldn't take my entire CD collection with me to California, so I only brought the highlights. Nixon in China made the cut. The CDs sat in their shoebox all the way across the country, and then sat in their shoebox some more while I slowly pieced my apartment together. Two weeks ago, I finally started listening to them all, and Nixon in China was first on the list.

It was a shocking experience.

I used to hear Nixon as a culmination, as a work in which Adams had gone from his early watered-down-Phillip-Glass works to his own mature, fully-fledged compositional voice. Now, it sounds like a beginning. I can tell that it's by the same composer who would one day go on to write "Batter my Heart", but he is so not there yet. It sounds experimental, like he's still fumbling towards the composer he would become.

I can't go back to hearing Nixon the way I used to. I can't un-know Doctor Atomic or A Flowering Tree, can't un-read Hallelujah Junction and the sometimes off-putting attitudes it contains, can't de-nuance my understanding of the context of his music. But I can remember.

Even as I heard the work with completely different ears, I could still remember how I heard it before, and I could feel, acutely, the gap between how I heard it then and how I hear it now.

This isn't always the case. Some things are just too new — I fell in love with Whitelake this past March; there hasn't been enough time yet for me to grow a new set of ears. Some things visit too rarely. Luciano Berio's Sequenza XII has been bouncing around my life for nearly a decade now, but has yet to stay long enough to make a lasting impression. Other things never get far enough away. Paul Hindemith's bassoon sonata*, Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring — these things are never far away. I hear new things each time I listen, but because of this they mutate slowly; they grow as I do, with no sharp breaks or yawning discontinuities. Sometimes, you need to see a valley to tell how far you've come.

I've written before about how music accumulates meaning with repeated hearings, how when you hear a performance of, say, Ludwig van Beethoven's seventh symphony, you're hearing not only that performance, but all the other ones you've ever heard. This is the other side of that. When you listen to a piece you know well, you're also listening back to your own past selves. Nixon in China isn't just a window to all the other times I've heard the opera, it's a window into who I was for all those other listenings.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of music. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my past. I grow, I change, I move on, I forget. It's a continuous process, and it's easy to miss the differences piling up. But then sometimes, when a certain song comes on, I pause. I listen. I wake up. I come back to myself.
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*I have come to the conclusion that there just aren't recordings of the Hindemith bassoon sonata that I actually like. This one is pretty good, but it splits the last movement into two tracks; the "Langsam" track has the first section of the second movement, and the "Marsch" track has the last two sections. If you're just listening thru, it doesn't make much of a difference, but I feel compelled to mention it here as a little outpost in the perpetual battle against minor inaccuracies and questionable bibliographic decisions on the internet.

Making Up and Making Over

Western concert music, with its centuries-old tradition(s) of scholarship and study, has some very specific terms for very specific things: Essential Structural Closure, a modulation to the flat submediant, and my go-to bugaboo hexachordal combinatoriality — these all refer to pretty specific things and those specific things only.

Western concert music, being a rowdy and living tradition practiced by untold numbers of people with wildly different levels of formal education, also has some terms that can pretty much mean anything you want.

"Arranging" falls decidedly into the latter category.

I think most people, even non-musicians, have a pretty firm grasp on what it means to compose something. The specific process will vary from person to person, but at its heart, you go into a room with a blank piece of paper, and you come out with a piece of music. For some people, that involves literally sitting at a piano and plugging away, for others it involves fiddling with audio samples in a computer program, but either way, the result is much the same: The composer is the person who decides what sounds happen when*.

Arranging is much more nebulous.

At one end of its possible meanings, you have what can also be called transcription: Taking a work originally scored for one ensemble and scoring it for a different one, as with the concert band version of Leonard Bernstein's Overture to Candide compared to the orchestral original. Calling something a transcription implies a high degree of fidelity to the original source material. The instruments change, but the form remains the same. If you run across something labeled as a transcription, you wouldn't expect to find different harmonies or new countermelodies, at least not in the way that most people use the term today.

At the other end of the scale, you have things like Jimmy Mundy's arrangement of Louis Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing" for Benny Goodman, which alters almost every aspect of the original**, up to and including the melody itself. (Few arrangements take this degree of latitude in the concert music world, what with our general reverence for scores and source material, but it's absolutely common practice in jazz and other less score-based musics.)

A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle. When William Schuman arranged his New England Triptych from orchestra to wind ensemble, he transcribed the first two movements with minimal alteration, but completely revised the third, nearly doubling it in length from its original incarnation. Gustav Mahler's piano parts for the piano-vocal versions of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs are not simply reductions of the full orchestral score from his orchestral arrangements.

Then, too, there are cases where the orchestration — the determination of which instruments play which notes — is so striking, so specific that, even tho the melodies and harmonies of the original are preserved in every detail, it seems misleading to call the new work "just" an arrangement of the previous one. The most iconic instance of this is probably Anton Webern's arrangement of one of the fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Musical Offering — Webern's meticulously detailed and relentlessly modern scoring transform Bach's exacting counterpoint into a psychedelic whirlwind of motives and fragments; it's an arrangement, sure, but one so strongly marked by the arranger's aesthetic that one almost wants to give them co-compositional credit for the resulting masterpiece. (You don't need two different people, either. The end of Igor Stravinsky's Svadebka (aka Les noces aka The Wedding) is another place where "the notes and rhythms being played" and "the instruments playing them" seem impossible to separate; orchestration and composition become one. (The passage in question, where frenetic energy gives way to the purified ringing of bells, begins around 8'17", but the whole thing is worth a listen if you have the time.))

Given this nebulosity, it might be tempting to dismiss "arranging" as a useless term. To the contrary, it's precisely this nebulosity that makes it useful. I can say that I'm "arranging" some of the music from Window Full of Moths for wind ensemble, and I don't have to clarify that, while the second movement is essentially a transcription of "Beside You", the third is a mixture of the opening of "Hey" and a radically altered version of "Stop Dreaming", with some new material thrown in to stitch them together, and then —

Arranging encompasses all these things in a way that gets at the core of what I'm doing: This music existed before. I'm changing it in some ways so that it exists in another form as well. Some of these changes are small, and some of them are big, but for the most part, we neither need nor want to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty specifics of which are which. Having a catch-all like "arranging" lets us get away from worrying about arbitrary distinctions on a continuous continuum and gives us more time to spend actually making art.

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*There are, of course, exceptions where composers leave room for other people or things to make some of these decisions. For now, I'm simply ignoring this type of composition, but I think it can be subsumed into this framework with little difficulty.

**I am not actually 100% certain that this is the original arrangement given the sheer number of recordings of this tune and Spotify's spotty bibliographic information. If someone could confirm this or provide a link to the actual original arrangement, I would greatly appreciate it.

The Courtiers and the Dragons

We all know it. It's rule No. 1 of the internet: Don't Read The Comments.

Most often, this is because the comments section is infested with trolls, people spewing racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of hateful bile. (Hence Lewis's Law: The comments on any article about feminism demonstrate the necessity of feminism.) While it can sometimes be hard to tell whether a given commenter is earnest but confused as opposed to flat-out trolling, I think most people would agree that there's little point in engaging those in the latter category.

Sometimes, tho, the comments will actually be on point, there will be an actual discussion of the issues going on, with people on both sides arguing in good faith. And sometimes, especially when the discussion involves the fundamental human rights of an oppressed group, the people in these comment threads, usually those who are members of the oppressed group in question, will become visibly hurt and angry. This can manifest in caps-lock-laden declarations ("I'M SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS") or sardonic mockery ("lol, misandry"), but either way, they are often then accused of being "immature" or otherwise criticized for not carrying on a "reasoned, dispassionate intellectual debate" about issues that affect them on a deeply personal level.

I'm sure many of you reading this are familiar with a slew of defenses of this behavior (the angry, hurt commenting, not the criticism thereof). Members of oppressed groups are, you know, oppressed, and asking them to set aside the genuine hurt that they feel for the sake of a "calm" debate about their fundamental rights is pretty gross. (If you want a more thoro explanation of this concept, look up "tone policing" and have a field day. tl;dr: If your commitment to, say, "basic human rights for trans people" is contingent upon trans people being nice to you, people are probably right to question how deep that commitment really is.) This is all old hat.

Today I want to take a different tack.

I have never been a heavy commenter. At times, tho, I have been a heavy comment reader, especially back in middle school and high school, when I had different priorities involving how to use my free time. These were dark days indeed, my friends, when I didn't understand what feminism was, still thought I was heterosexual, and was kinda homophobic to boot. (What can I say? I had a lot to learn.) But still, I'd often wind up reading long comment threads about these issues, rife with some people arguing calmly and logically for whatever it was (gay marriage crops up a lot in my memory, but it could have been for any of a number of other issues) and others raging in anger and hurt.

And I have to say, it was the latter category that gave me the most pause.

Because carefully reasoned arguments? Sure, if you're being strictly methodical and intensely rational, those can be hard to overcome. But if you're reading quickly, just trying to get a feel for the positions? It is very easy to just go "Eh . . . maybe. I don't really care enough to tease it out and put my finger on it precisely, but I feel like there's something I disagree with buried in there, so I'm not going to accept that position as my own. And reasonable people disagree about things all the time, so like whatever.". But people screaming with hurt? People so upset by these positions that they could do nothing but cry out in frustration and rage? That's a lot hard to dismiss. Those comments made me hold myself accountable. "OK," I would think to myself, "If you're going to continue to hold a position that is this upsetting to this many people, you had better be damn sure that you can answer every objection to it." Those comments made me go back and do the careful, methodical work of trying to pick holes in the opposition.

And often I couldn't. Often, the discomfort I felt reading those arguments wasn't the discomfort of a hidden logical flaw but was instead the discomfort of realizing that I held a homophobic (or sexist or racist or . . . ) position and being confronted with the necessity of change. I never would have done that work if it hadn't been for those angry comments. In all likelihood, I would still be the sexist, racist, homophobic jerk I was in middle school. (I am not claiming to have completely rid myself of any of these ideologies. But to the extent that I have gotten better about them, I feel a pretty direct causal link to angry people commenting on the internet.)

Many of the attacks on tone policing that I've seen quietly abandon this point. I've read too many articles that, while offering a full-throated defense of the acceptability and necessity of unapologetic, confrontational outrage, tacitly seem to cede that these angry comments don't win over allies. Winning over allies isn't the goal of every debate, nor should it be, but even when it is, I maintain that calm, dispassionate comments are not the only kind that are helpful.

Because when you're commenting in a public or semi-public forum, you're not only engaging with the other commenters. You're also leaving a record for other people just passing by. Snark and fury may not directly convince the person posting counterarguments, but they can have a powerful effect on people lurking on the sidelines. I'm not arguing that everyone should scream all the time in every context; I am merely offering another defense of its use that I often see get short shrift.

So if you're thinking of tone policing: 1) Don't do it, because it only ever serves to further oppression and 2) Remember that there are people who read without commenting. It isn't always about you.

Taking Stock

I’m still getting over the intensity of the audition on Tuesday (and the (very mild — don’t worry, Mom!) downtick in physical health that inevitably followed on Wednesday), so I’m going to do a lighter post this week. Instead of my usual essay-ish format, I’m going to post about what i hope to accomplish in the next little chunk of time.

• Assuming I didn’t make it into AYS, I’m going to start working up one of the Bach cello suites (probably the third one) to post movement by movement on YouTube. I may decide on a specific and explicit schedule, or I may just see how it goes. I still want to make music with other people, but this will be a good way to keep my hand in the bassooning game.
• Related to this: If I do hear back in the negative, I’m going to ping some of my contacts for thoughts about how to keep an ear out for gigs in the area. I’m fine with something super casual/chill, I just want to be making music with other people again. (If any of my followers have tips on this, they’d be more than welcome!)
• This weekend I’m going to procure a desperately-needed second bookshelf, a butter dish, and hopefully a nightstand of some sort. Then, when the piano arrives, my apartment will finally be out of the “gradually setting up shop” phase! (I know it’s taken me more than two months to get there, quiet, you.)
• On the composition front: I’m pressing on with arranging some of the music fromWindow Full of Moths (specifically the opening number, “Beside You”, “Hey” + “Stop Dreaming”, and the final sequence) for wind ensemble. I ran out of giant staff paper (more is coming with the piano!), so I’m starting to enter parts until I get more. I feel like I’m making good progress on it, and that it’s going to be a fun thing for people to play. 
• Once that’s done, priorities are: Revise the clarinet sonata, revise Window and get the parts and score into reasonably presentable shape, and then arrange the clarinet sonata for wind ensemble as well. In the meantime, I’m also going to keep my eye on the ACF opportunities page, and send scores in to those that seem like things I want to/can do. The world will not come knocking; I have to take the initiative.
• I’m going to hold off on looking for opportunities to volunteer until I know for certain how the AYS audition turned out. Too many variables on that front at the moment.
• I want to get back into the habit of reading. Since I have the job, I don’t think I can quite get away with the hour and a half with a book thing I did every morning last summer, but the “half hour before bed” should be pretty doable.  I’m still clearing out a lot of links that I saved during term, but now that I don’t have how-to GoogleDocs to write, I’m making pretty good progress.
• I feel like I still need to build up my apartment as more of a “home base”. I don’t really mean this in any physical sense; I just still don’t quite feel like it’s 100% home. I think this will mostly involve giving myself permission to just veg out in front of a Netflix show or two, to teach myself that it’s OK to not be in constant motion doing all the things all the time. I’m still definitely weaning myself from the Yale lifestyle, and that’s something that’s just going to take time.

So yeah. These are things I’d like to do. Some of them are super vague, some of them are super concrete, but all of them feel pretty plausible to me. Sometimes it’s nice to take a larger view of where I am and what I’m doing. It doesn’t all have to be the breathless rush of the moment.

Regular posting resumes next week!

Four Days and Counting

So in a little over four days’ time, I’ll be sitting in a room with a panel of judges playing my audition for the American Youth Symphony. 

There is not much left to be done in these four days. I will, of course, be making the most out of the time I have left to practice, but these things are incremental. Between now and Tuesday, I may go from nailing the first entrance in the Rite of Spring solo eighteen times out of twenty to nineteen, but I’m not going to be able to radically alter how I play anything. I am, effectively, in the land of the most subtle refinements; where I am now is where I will be Tuesday.

I’ve spent a long time preparing for this. I mean, of course, the roughly two months I’ve been working on the audition repertoire, but I also mean my life as a bassoonist before this point. I didn’t start from nothing in the middle of June, I started from years and years of intense, dedicated work, and a familiarity with most of the material I’ll be performing. With the exception of the solo piece, I have been working on everything I’ll be playing on Tuesday since high school.

In some sense, tho, the preparation goes even deeper than that. The way I turn a phrase, how I conceive of musical lines and larger forms — these things will be on display in the audition room, and I’ve been learning them for much longer than I’ve been wrapping my fingers around the awkward mechanics of the bassoon. The cassette tapes I fell asleep to when I was a toddler, the piano lessons I took in elementary school, the mp3s I listen to as I go about my day job — all of these are training grounds for the more fundamental tasks of making music.

Given this, it’s easy to see an audition as a kind of summation, an evaluation of who you are as a musician. This can be thrilling and affirmational when things go well, but it can also be a crushing source of disillusionment when they don’t. I try not to think of it that way.

For starters, everyone makes mistakes. This is true even at the highest levels. I have heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra slip up during Stravinsky, I have seen the Metropolitan Opera nearly come apart at the seams playing Wagner. I am not a machine; I will not and cannot be perfect every time. Even if I only muff an excerpt 1% of the time, there’s still a chance that Tuesday at 6:30pm will not be in the 99% I’m happy with.

But it’s also true that auditions are not a perfect measure of musicianship. Indeed, I think many of my finest qualities as a musician are not those that are tested in an audition room. My ability to blend, to match pitch, to play a supporting line underneath the primary voice, to internalize a score and snap back into place when things go wrong, to keep my cool and blithely continue after stumbling, to follow a soloist doing … expressive things with time — none of these will be clearly on display. Certainly, an audition will measure much of what I can do on a bassoon, but much will go unaccounted for as well. (Many groups have a probational period for just this reason.)

All of which is immaterial if everyone else happens to be better than me this year. Or if the audition committee has preconceived notions about whose students they will and won’t accept. (Music, alas, is not some magical fairyland where human pettiness is banished.) Perhaps they’re looking for a different sound, or a different sensibility as to how to build to a climax. I can control how I prepare, I can control how I play, but I can’t control any of these things, and many more besides.

So I try to let them go.

I try, as much as I can, to think “Hey, let me show you this!” in the audition room, not “Oh no, what are they going to think of me?”. I try to play first for myself, so that I can walk out of that room thinking “Yes. That is how I sound. That is how I play. That was a good representation of what I have to offer.” And if they’re not interested, well, they’re not interested. Sometimes there will be obvious mistakes, but often not. Often, you can only guess as to why the committee passed you by. 

And so it goes. If I get in, I will be thrilled. The AYS is an excellent group, and they have an exciting season lined up. If I don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. There are other ways I can keep making music. And hey, there’s always next year. If they pass me up at this audition, I’ll have that much more time to get in shape for the next one.

I may have been preparing for this all my life, but there’s always room to improve.

Letters: An Appreciation

As most of my friends could tell you, I’m a pretty active user of social media. My tumblr may not be the most prolific out there, but anyone I follow could tell you the frequency with which I like and reply to posts. I’m all over Facebook, and I’m thinking about signing up for Twitter. I may not be the model of a modern hip millennial, but I’m a pretty far cry from a Luddite or a technophobe.

It may come as something of a surprise, then, that my favorite form of long-term communication is the hand-written letter.

I like receiving letters. I like the feel of them in my hand, the weight of their pages, light but still perceptible. I like seeing people’s handwriting, matching letterforms to syntax. I like learning my friends’ approaches to errors, how they react to an encroaching margin. I like being able to live with the anticipation and mystery of an unopened envelope — a letter can’t be answered on the day of its arrival, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t open it the minute you receive it.

I like sending letters. I like clearing out the time to write them, marking out an hour or so to just Do One Thing, without the convenient distraction of another browser tab. I like the expansive, meditative mood I get into when I’m writing them — tidbits of news will be long dated by the time a reply arrives, but zooming out a bit and summing up an overview has a bit more staying power. I like the physicality of a pen gliding across paper, of seeing an empty page fill up with flowing scrawls. I like knowing that if they get shoved inside a shoebox and tucked away in a cool dry place for fifty years, they’ll probably be perfectly readable, unlike a desktop hard drive.

I like the content letters get out of me. I don’t like leaving lots of empty space, so unlike an e-mail which is always only as long as it is, I dig a little deeper and tell stories that might otherwise fall by the wayside. From what I can tell, many of my correspondents do this as well, and these little tidbits, the small and almost accidental windows into their lives, are sources of profound delight.

Much of this is rank sentiment. There’s no reason I can’t write the same way in a Facebook message as I do with a pen on the page. (I could even set myself character minimums if I really needed the goading.) Facebook and tumblr provide many little windows, with built-in ways for expressing appreciation for them. Knowing someone’s handwriting doesn’t really tell you anything new about them.

So?

I am a creature of sentiment. I like many of the things I like without rhyme or reason. My goal is not to lead a life filled only with things defensible from first principles, to cut every trace of inefficiency or irrationality from what I do. I want to enjoy the ride, not streamline my journey to its end.

Letters aren’t for everything. I wouldn’t give up my ability to text my collaborators, to simultaneously chat with friends in Connecticut, Thailand, and Japan, to reblog trenchant commentary about the latest Marvel film — not for an infinite supply of postage stamps. Social media isn’t always and only a source of pure unblemished good, but I wouldn’t want to go back to the days where I had to rely on the postal system to hear about Ferguson. Letters aren’t for everything.

But the things they are for, they’re pretty good at. So if you can spare the time (and it’s certainly true not everyone can), maybe think about writing a letter to someone you love. It won’t heal all the broken places in the world, but it might just build a few islands of calm.

And if you’re a friend of mine: Can I have your address?

Not So Universal

If you spend much time listening to people talk about music, sooner or later you’re pretty much guaranteed to hear someone tout music (especially western concert music from, say, 1600 to 1945ish) as a “universal language” that can transcend temporal and cultural boundaries and speak to people with very different personal backgrounds. Now, to some degree this is obviously true. People who are not 17th-century Italian aristocrats can enjoy Monteverdi; Beethoven’s ninth symphony did not die with the last audience member at its premiere. 

But take a listen to something like Vincent Persichetti’s Parable IX for concert band. It’s an acerbic, uncompromising work full of jagged motifs and harsh edges. If music is a language, most people would say this is sheer gibberish.

And yet we’ve only gone a very small way outside of the concert music canon. Persichetti was trained thoroughly in classical composition, and Parable IX dates from 1972, within thirty years of such popular pieces as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and Copland’s third symphony (1946). If our goal is to plumb the depths of musical diversity, we’ve barely dipped our toes in, and we’re already running into incomprehensibility.

Seems like a pretty dismal prospect for universality, no?

At this point, some of you may be thinking to yourselves “well, of course not all music has universal appeal, only some of it does!”.

I think we need to go further. None of it does.

No one is born with an appreciation for Beethoven. No one comes out of the womb tapping their foot to Sondheim or Porter. These tastes have to be acquired.

If Beethoven’s fifth symphony seems to resonate with “everyone” today, it is only because we have never stopped teaching people to understand Beethoven. Even ignoring the (considerable) play time for his actual works, the underpinnings of his language are everywhere, from muzak to movie scores. Music works by setting up patterns that listeners recognize and then either fulfilling them or tweaking them in surprising ways. If you don’t have an intuitive understanding of the patterns, you won’t be able to make head or tail of the music that uses them. This is why the Persichetti from earlier is so nonsensical to so many people — He’s using patterns that are far enough outside the average listener’s experience that said average listener can’t tell when they’re being fulfilled and when they’re being violated — they can’t feel the forces of expectation and surprise that make music tick. Beethoven is universal only insofar as the patterns he uses in his music are.

(Lest anyone argue that prevalence of western musical patterns is due to some inherent superiority on the patterns’ behalf: These patterns were in vogue among the European elite at a time when they were colonizing as many other parts of the world as it could and systematically destabilizing and attempting to eradicate indigenous cultural traditions. This is … not a coincidence.)

That you have to know the patterns to understand the music, however, offers some hope. Recognizing these kinds of patterns is a matter of familiarity. You don’t have to know what a Perfect Authentic Cadence is to get the emotional impact of one; you don’t have to study theory and scores, you just have to listen. If you want to “get into” a new style of music, from modernist works for wind band to traditional Indian ragas and beyond, all you have to do is listen. Studying the theory may help if you have the background to make sense of it, but listening is the key. At first, things will sound like an undifferentiated wash (and possibly a pretty unpleasant one at that), but in time, with enough exposure, your brain will start to make sense of what’s coming at it — you’ll start to pick out islands of difference in the sea of sameness. You’ll start to understand what you’re hearing. It will start to mean things to you. (Whether this payoff is worth the amount of time you’ll have to spend with confused ears is something only you can answer.)

No style of music is universal, but the tools to understand it are available to all who can hear.