brettworks

thinking through music, sound and culture
February 15, 2012

On Piano Lessons: Tricia Tunstall’s “Note By Note”

“An instrumentalist is an athlete.” –Tricia Tunstall

For many people, taking piano lessons is an initial gateway to learning to make and understand music for themselves. Knowing that 88-key terrain of black and white tones and semitones is a giant step towards understanding the pushes and pulls of tonal music, and piano playing makes mind and hands dexterous, connecting the physical with the emotional through sound. Last but not least, taking piano lessons–probably, it’s safe to say, more so than taking guitar or drum lessons–is a marker of social class and badge of having a well-rounded education. If you’ve learned and practiced your scales, played Beethoven’s “Für Elise”, some atmospheric Debussy maybe, or even mastered a clinical Bach invention or fugue, you’ve partaken in the canon of western classical music–that grand 1000 year-old behemoth that continues to inform and influence so much other music around the world even as it risks becoming a museum piece itself.

In her book Note By Note (2009), Tricia Tunstall explores the experience of teaching piano, that “weekly session alone together, physically proximate, concentrating on the transfer of a skill that is complicated and difficult” (3). Tunstall, a veteran teacher of children and teenagers of all ages and stages, conveys well the relationships among herself, her students, the piano, and the notes on the page in this fluid, insightful, and eminently readable memoir. Every student has different needs, interests, and abilities, yet each must learn how to really listen to sound and learn how “to rescue music from its ubiquity–to pull it from the background to the forefront, free it from its uses” (7). Piano lessons, Tunstall says, are about (re)situating music as an autonomous practice–to save it from being merely a thing downloaded and listened to as a soundtrack for something else. Note By Note captures the piano lesson itself as a kind of autonomous practice. It’s a space to learn about the development and limits of skill, concentration, and the musicking body.

Young children especially seem to intuitively understand music as an object of inherent pleasure, taking delight in finding the right keys and “enjoying pure sonority” (18). But as their piano lessons progress over time and make music increasingly a process of serious study, the lessons also discipline the students in ways that will curtail that intuitive enjoyment of pure sonority. As Tunstall notes, sometimes the acquisition of a musical skill comes at the expense of a musical impulse” (18). For example, for many piano students, learning to read notes on a page entails “the death of the improvisatory impulse” (21). Tunstall admits to being uneasy about this fact of western music enculturation: on the one hand, one needs to learn how to read in order to have access to all that great music; on the other hand, as our eyes become adept at interpreting notes on the page as “music” some of the subtle connections between the ear and the “improvisatory impulse” are muted. Tunstall addresses this fact by having all her students improvise at the end of their lessons. It’s not a perfect solution, but it reinforces the idea that music is a living activity and not just an acquired skill of note-decoding.

Not surprisingly, popular music is of great interest to many of Tunstall’s students, and some of the more interesting sections in Note By Note chronicle the author’s assessing the musical qualities of rock, jazz, pop, and especially hip hop musics as she helps students figure out how to play their favorite songs on the piano. Many sample-based hip hop songs are, of course, impossible to render (for how does one render spoken word and a rhythm track on a piano?) and it’s fascinating to learn how Tunstall negotiates the terrain of rhythm-based musics while her students look at her expectantly with a please help me figure out how to play my favorite song look.

But for all her attempts to engage with popular music, Tunstall’s allegiances are firmly in the classical world, which she considers “still the most eloquent and compelling manifestation of the musical language we all know” (85). (A minor quibble here: Who is this homogenous “we” Tunstall addresses? “We” don’t all know this musical language–many of us speak in alternate tongues…) And, remarkably, as her students “use their iPods to construct their own musical neighborhoods out of the vast territory of what’s available” (117), somehow classical music finds a way into their listening lives, over and over again. Tunstall marvels at this, but doesn’t take it for granted; she’s receptive to students wanting to learn music that they once heard somewhere and were hooked. For Tunstall, this is simply evidence that the canon of classical piano music has a power “to move those spirits that are open to being moved” (82).

Which brings us to Eddie, one of the dozen or so students whose progress Tunstall carefully maps over the course of her book. Eddie is smitten by Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata (Piano Sonata No.8 in C minor) and desperately wants to learn to play it. Tunstall worries that Eddie has neither “emotional experience nor aural image to guide him” (129), yet Eddie is undeterred, driven by a musically-triggered desire to make Beethoven’s music his own, to get it into his fingers and embody its notes. And so student and teacher embark on the slow process of learning the sonata together. Eddie eventually learns to play it, note by note, and play it well too. “Through playing” Tunstall observes proudly, “he was actually learning a new way to feel” (130).

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February 13, 2012

On The Trickle Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics III: Acousmatic Sound And Authenticity At The 2012 Grammy Awards

“All cultural change is essentially technology-driven.” – William Gibson

This year’s Grammy Awards featured the first ever performances of live electronic dance music, showcasing the DJs David Guetta and deadmau5 with R&B singer Chris Brown, rapper Lil Wayne, and the rock band Foo Fighters in what the Los Angeles Times aptly called “a confused, if well-meaning, picture of dance music’s place and influence in current pop.”

There were two catches to the performances. The first is that they took place outside the Staples Center in a tent designed to resemble a 1990s rave–complete with lazers and audience members wielding glowsticks. Evidently, turning the main auditorium into a club space wasn’t going to happen; better to keep “serious” popular music safe (for the moment) from electronic enchroachment. The second catch to the performances is that both DJs–Guetta and deadmau5–were paired with other artists, telegraphing the message that manipulating digital turntables still does not quite constitute a “performance.” What are we supposed to look at? And where exactly is the demonstration of instrumental virtuosity? So as Guetta worked his turntables on his infectious song “I Can Only Imagine”, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne stalked the stage in Auto-Tuned perfection to reassure viewers that this was pretty much like a traditional show—except that Guetta’s DJ rig replaced the whole band. The TV cameras occasionally showed close-ups of Guetta’s hands moving fast over wheels, buttons, and sliders. But unlike a typical epic DJ set, the song lasted just 3 minutes.

Next up were the Canadian producer deadmau5 and the Foo Fighters. deadmau5 had remixed the Foos’ song “Rope” in 2011 and their collaboration at the Grammys was a demonstration of how remixing works. First, the Foos performed one-and-a-half minutes of “Rope” in the song’s original rock incarnation. As the song’s finishing chords rang out, deadmau5 entered with a quantized (and slightly slower-paced) four-on-the-floor stomp, and the Foos played along as if resigned to the metronomic pulse. This collaboration lasted all of 55 seconds (hey, it’s for TV after all) and seemed to drain the song of its original energy. Then deadmau5 played one minute of dubstep from his song “Raise Your Weapon.” It was probably the most musical moment of the whole 6-minute performance–just pure dubstep groove–though Deadmau5 is known more as a house music producer than as a bonafide dubstepper. And just as Guetta had Chris Brown and Lil Wayne on hand to provide visual spectacle, deadmau5 wore his tradmark giant LCD-lit headpiece to give us something to look at. Unlike the Foos’ hands which could be seen picking away on those electric guitars, deadmau5’s hands and his DJ rig were hidden from view.

And it’s precisely this that’s at stake when people talk about what makes rock/pop music authentic and electronic music lacking in authenticity: we can see rock/pop musicians generating sound, while the techniques of electronic musicians are either hidden (we can’t see what they’re doing to make sound) or diffuse in the sense that their music making was done over the days, weeks and months of a solitary and private production process that assembled a track bit by bit. So when it comes to time to “performing” an electronic music mix, it’s not always clear to the concert-viewer what the DJ/producer is doing besides playing back a track and tweaking a few elements here and there. (Was Guetta doing anything substantial to “I Can Only Imagine” or were his rapid hand movements just to convey a sense of musical busyness?) This is most of all a problem of what the French musique concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer in 1955 called acousmatic sound: sound one hears without seeing its source, sound emanating from a loudspeaker without a musician in view who is the unmistakable creator of that sound. Even today, this makes some people in the popular music establishment nervous, especially considering that electronic music seems to be eating rock and pop music wholesale, one song at a time.

The complete Grammy performance of all five artists is here:

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February 9, 2012

On Bass Culture: Beats By Dr. Dre Headphones

If you look around the streets of New York you see a lot of folks wearing Beats by Dr. Dre, those giant black and red (or white and red) plastic over-the-ear headphones with their iconic red cables. The Beats headphones are the result of a collaboration between Monster, an audio cable manufacturing company, and Dr.Dre, the hip hop artist, producer, and impresario. The headphones are expensive, but they also provide a whole lot of bass frequencies and low-end excitement.

Here is Dr. Dre. on the Beats website, making the pitch for his headphones:

“People aren’t hearing all the music. Artists and producers work hard in the studio perfecting their sound. But people can’t really hear it with normal headphones. Most headphones can’t handle the bass, the detail, the dynamics. Bottom line, the music doesn’t move you. With Beats, people are going to hear what the artists hear, and listen to the music the way they should: the way I do.”

Notwithstanding that vaguely threatening last sentence where Dre admonishes us to listen to music the way we should which is the way he does (gulp), the strange thing about this assessment of the Beats’ sound quality is that it gets it wrong. To my ear, the headphones have a ton of bass yet seemingly at the expense of detail and dynamics; they sound somewhat muffled–like someone cranked the bass dial all the way up and just left the treble in the middle. These headphones, then, certainly aren’t “normal”, but rather EQ’d in a way that accentuates their low frequencies at the expense of a balanced response across the full frequency spectrum. I’ve listened to music on them and heard the low-end of kick drums actually crackle and distort because they’re so accentuated.

Yet this assessment is not necessarily a criticism. Because if you like to listen to your music loud–which many people do–the thing that literally “moves you”, as Dre. puts it, is precisely those low-end frequencies. In fact, if you’re listening to a really loud playback in the studio control room or in a club, your body can take low-end at punishing decibel levels as long as the high-end isn’t too prominent and harsh. (But if the high-end is loud, then it won’t be long until your ears start ringing and that, my friend, is not at all a good thing–and is your cue to put in those foam earplugs.) So, making a set of headphones with an exaggerated low-end frequency response is actually a good thing if your goal is to simulate the (kinda thrilling) experience of listening to your music played back powerfully loud in the studio or in a performance space whose subwoofers can easily rattle your ribcage. In a way, the Beats headphones are a part of the global diaspora of bass-heavy sound system cultures characterized by what Steve Goodman (who is no stranger to bass frequencies through his musical work as Kode 9) calls “bass materialism” whose aim is nothing less than a sonic “rearrangement of the senses” (Sonic Warfare, The MIT Press, 2010, p.28). Wearing Beats is like having a soundsystem right around your head.

How to explain the popularity of the Beats? One explanation is that our bass-heavy musics–hip hop and also other varieties of electronic dance music especially–really shine and thrum with the bass turned way up. It just feels good to listen to those musics like this. Riding that slow oscillating wave of bass throbble goodness it can almost feel like you’re floating. Another more pragmatic explanation is that the noisy soundscapes of the city require us to either plug our ears, wear noise-canceling headphones, or otherwise compete with booming bass.

From what I see around me, a lot of listeners are choosing the bass option.

***

(Triumphant New York Giants returning home after their Super Bowl Victory. Their choice of headphones? Beats By Dr. Dre . . .)

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February 6, 2012

On (Making) Recordings Versus (Living) Live Music

“Record stores”, a friend of mine once memorably observed as we drove past one, “are where music goes to die.” And with the demise of record stores, music recordings–and by recordings I mean CDs–have had a tough time surviving since MP3 downloading became the primary way most people get their music. For musicians, it used to be a big deal to make your own recording. Once upon a time you needed money to go into a studio and record, and you needed more resources to have your music mastered, packaged and promoted. If you had distribution, your recording might even find its way into a bin at Tower Records, where it would sit and be mostly ignored. But these days any musician with a computer and an Internet connection can make a recording and distribute it around the world to anyone who may want to listen (and getting people to listen is harder than it may seem). So our recordings don’t go to die in record stores anymore; they just languish in relative obscurity among the billions of other bytes of sound swirling out there in cyberspace.

***

In his recent New Yorker article “Flight Of The Concord”, classical pianist Jeremy Denk artfully describes the process of recording and editing a piece of solo piano music. The music is Charles Ives’ “Piano Sonata No.2″ (1920), also known as the Concord Sonata, an eclectic piece in whose transcendentalism-inspired polytonal and polyrhythmic juxtaposition of musical styles–from marching band music to quotations from Beethoven all mashed up together–one hears a musical postmodernism well before its time.

In explaining the process of recording Ives’s difficult music, Denk conveys the challenges raised in a typical studio session–from the way microphone placement affects (and often misrepresents) an instrument’s sound, to matters of musical interpretation and fidelity to the piece’s printed score. There are so many moving parts to capturing a live performance that it’s a minor miracle that any studio session ever goes right, especially considering what Denk calls the “tragedy” of recording itself. As busy as the musician (and the sound engineer, the producer) is “engaged in a task of reproduction, you keep coming up against the irreproducible.” In other words, what makes music music is very hard to capture and reproduce on a recording.

In pointing towards this ineffable quality of music as the source of its mystery, Denk gets to the core of the dilemma of recordings for performing musicians. Recordings are not the real thing, they’re simulacra, “manicured artifacts, from which the essential spectacle of human effort has been clipped away.” And I imagine lots of musicians reading Denk’s article will have a good idea of the considerable physical and mental effort involved in learning a piece to the point that the music is internalized and can be performed (for those listening microphones) convincingly. Recordings may capture performances, to a degree, but they’re also entirely different beasts. They circulate one’s music, sure, but what is circulating is not the sonic-social transaction of the performer and his/her audience but rather an edited snapshot of a pseudo event that is the recording session.

It’s no wonder, then, that Denk concludes his finely tuned article–with his finished CD in hand, by the way–anticipating his next live performance of Ives’ Concord. Next time, he assures us, it will be totally different…

You can read Denk’s writing here.

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February 2, 2012

On Nostalgia And The Voice Of Michael McDonald

I’m in the grocery store, staring at the fish offerings, when a subtle wave of melancholy washes over me. I’m restless and keep moving, eyeing products on the shelves, looking for a particular milk brand–but I just can’t shake this feeling. Since when is grocery shopping such an emotional experience? The milk and some odds and ends (OJ, cheese balls, bread, but no fish) secured in my basket, at last I’m standing in the checkout line when I figure out the source of my feelings: why it’s the soulful sounds of Michael McDonald!

McDonald has been in the popular music business a long time. Beginning in the 1970s he worked extensively as a background vocalist on countless studio sessions (including records by Steely Dan), and was a singer, keyboardist and songwriter with the mega-million selling Doobie Brothers from 1975-1982. From there he went on to release solo records, re-recording soul music classics and collaborating with many other musicians. He still collaborates too–most recently contributing back up vocals to the track “While You Wait for the Others” by the indie rock band Grizzly Bear. Here’s McDonald observing the arc of popular music since his heyday:

“When I was with the Doobies, the style of music was that we all went over the falls with chord progressions, trying to make things as complex and interconnected as possible. The punk movement swung towards being as primitive as possible, but now it’s back to where these guys are good musicians. I never thought that would come back around, but it has.”

McDonald has a distinctive voice that is key to his success. Essentially he’s a “blue-eyed soul” singer (in the form of a very bearded white guy). McDonald’s voice has a powerful grain to it and when he reaches for high notes he can make listeners feel as well as any singer. This voice has been circulating for many years now too. It’s kind of ubiquitous–a sound that finds its way onto radio, television, and supermarket soundtrack playlists. McDonald seems aware of his voice’s easy-listening ubiquity too, having fun with it and making cameos in various places. There is an episode of Family Guy where McDonald plays a kind of one-man Greek chorus role, urgently echo-singing every word spoken by Peter Griffin and his friends because, as Rob Harvilla of The Village Voice observed, “it all just sounds better—sweeter, smoother, more soulful—when issued from his lips.”

Urgency is the key to McDonald’s vocal sound. The song I heard while shopping at the supermarket was “On My Own”, a duet McDonald did with Patti LaBelle in 1986 that hit number one on the billboard charts. The hook and chorus of LaBelle’s song is, surprise, surprise, the phrase “on my own” that rises by just a few tones. The melody isn’t elaborate, merely traversing the interval of a minor third, but such is the urgency of McDonald (and LaBelle, of course) that he can transform these three pitches into something movingly nostalgic. Interestingly for me, though, the nostalgia is without an object: McDonald’s voice doesn’t make me long for anything specific, it just seems to embody the state of longing itself.

What a voice! Easy to parody, perhaps, but still enough to make you freeze in the checkout line and start paying attention to the source of your feelings.

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January 30, 2012

On Recorded Music’s Last Gasp: More On Evanescent Materials In Solid Containers


Walking the aisles of a neighborhood drugstore I came upon a strange sight: a small, sad rack of CDs. From top to bottom were eight different releases I could identify (see pic above), including works by Santana, Aerosmith, Hall and Oats, Sade, Earth, Wind & Fire, Elvis, Bob Dylan, AC-DC, and a Michael Jackson compilation (which didn’t make it into my photo). All of these CDs–the Sade and AC-DC notwithstanding–were greatest hits and priced at a reasonable 9.99 each. As it goes, the selection on the drugstore rack is a fair representation of mainstream American popular music mostly (minus Elvis and Dylan) from the 1970s and 80s. All of the artists have sold many millions or tens of millions of recordings and their music continues to live on the radio and in television commercials where it earns royalties. (Case in point: last year there was a Walmart Black Friday commercial that used the first two pounding and anthemic measures of AC-DC’s “Back In Black” which must have cost a fortune to license.)

The selection of music also illustrates what happens to music the artifact: it ends up somewhere, far from the time and place of its creation, far from its original context of meaning and popularity, far from all the invisible social and cultural codes and discourses and heavy promotion that made it work so well as a sonic glue that brought people together and feel so special back in the day–whether we’re talking about Sade’s “Smooth Operator”, EW&Fire’s “Shining Star”, or Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean.” And even as the musical artifact languishes on drugstore racks, the sounds of these artists are kept alive on oldies radio or on Walmart commercials. When we hear the music we feel stuff in different degrees and ways depending on our age and stage. The music cues times past and sometimes even vague memories.

The rack of CDs also reminds me of the workings of the popular music industry itself. We didn’t begin to see its tissue and sinew revealed until peer-to-peer digital downloading became a big deal in the late 1990s. This free sharing of music led to a widespread realization that the music industry had been manufacturing all this material stuff–78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs–but now MP3s and the Internet had crashed the money-making party by doing away with music’s former material containers. That’s what makes the rack of CDs so pitiful: it reminds us that we don’t really need music on a piece of plastic anymore, only hard drives to store our collections. Or wait, not even that: there’s cloud computing now. Maybe in this way music is at last returning to the ether where it belongs. Anyways, music was always promiscuous–it always wanted to be free.

***

In 1999, I attended a conference in San Francisco called “MB-5: The Future Of Music.” Among the speakers was John Perry Barlow, former lyricist of The Grateful Dead who had recently published in Wired magazine a manifesto about intellectual property in the digital age called “The Economy Of Ideas.” The article turned out to be prescient in anticipating issues that continue to animate the production and circulation of creative work online. The main issue for Barlow concerned the nature of information. Information, he says, “wants to be free”–it always seeks movement and fluidity–despite our attempts to control and regulate it through regimes of copyright and material packaging. In the pre-Internet era, Barlow observes, “the bottle was protected, not the wine.” But the Internet changed that:

“Now, as information enters cyberspace, the native home of Mind, these bottles are vanishing. With the advent of digitization, it is now possible to replace all previous information storage forms with one metabottle: complex and highly liquid patterns of ones and zeros. Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed– floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages–will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.”

At the MB-5 conference, other speakers predicted that in the future we would pay for our music as a monthly fee–like a utility bill.  Fast forward to 2012: surprisingly, despite the popularity of the Apple iTunes store and the I-can-own-any-one-song-for-99 cents business model, the music-as-utility future is already here in the form of services like Spotify. For ten dollars a month you have millions of pieces of music to listen to whenever and wherever you wish. Sounds pretty good to me (if only I could listen to millions of pieces of music per month).

So, where are we today? One wonderful thing about music free of its material containers is that it moves about so easily. And despite all the naysaying about the reduced sonic quality of MP3s, it turns out that most of us don’t really mind. It turns out that our interest in music these days is not all about sound resolution or fetishizing the musical object. It’s about being able to choose freely and juxtapose and listen to all eras and styles at once. If most of us are confined to the locales of where we live, then at least we can be cosmopolitan in our musical lives, finding alternate ways of experiencing the world through sounds from elsewhere available in an instant. Any young person who has grown up knowing only a Internet-connected world pretty much lives their music listening life according to this logic. Case in point: when I taught music to 9th graders I was always amazed at the wild variety of music on their digital devices–composers and bands from all eras and styles and cultures crammed up against one another in one glorious Musical Present. Like YouTube. And it didn’t matter where the music came from or how it was once packaged or marketed to a listening demographic. Maybe it was heard on a commercial (AC-DC on a Walmart ad perhaps?) or sampled on someone else’s song or discovered via YouTube surfing. The only thing that matters today, it seems, is whether or not the sounds speak to you in some way.

But back to that rack of CDs. Not only has the music industry long bottled music as 78s, LPs, cassettes and CDs that we must get our hands on and own. It has also long used bands to brand and bottle musical style for us to align our tastes and identities with. But if information, as Barlow says, truly wants to be free, then perhaps so does musical style and our tastes and ways of self-identifying with musical style. Instead of buying this musical product rather than that one, we have the option of learning to identify with all music. I realize that this is a naively idealistic and relativistic critical stance. But it’s also what reveals the choice between Michael Jackson, Elvis, or AC-DC and the other “classic” artists available for sale in the drugstore as so dismal. To be a truly free listener is to be reminded of how much music is out there that we haven’t yet met and said hello to.

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January 26, 2012

Ventrilo-Dialogue: A Conversation With Arvo Pärt

Chant: “(Advocatam) Llibre Vermell de Montserrat”

Arvo Pärt: ”Da Pacem Domine”

Arvo Pärt: ”Mein Weg”

Aphex Twin: “Rhubarb”

(Note: If you are looking for further musical juxtapositions, press play on the chant clip and when it arrives at 0:05 press play on the first Pärt clip [and turn up its volume slightly] and listen to the mix.)

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January 23, 2012

On Spam Feedback

One of the curious things about maintaining a blog–or maybe just my blog–is that most of the “feedback” I get is in the form of spam. My dashboard settings tell me that so far I’ve been “protected”, thank goodness, from some 1600 spam messages (and counting) that keeping hitting the blog like bugs splattering on a moving car’s windshield. Some of this spam, however, manages to trickle in past my protective spam filter and kind of impress me. The spam is computer generated and this, presumably, is the source of its strangeness–real people don’t speak like this–that occasionally manages to speak in grand profundities. Or if not in grand profundities, then at least in humorous terms. Here are some examples of spam feedbacks that made me pause and think for a moment about what I’m doing and the massive sea of spam-generating machines out into which I broadcast:

“I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book.”

“Yes this paragraph is in fact nice and I have learned lot of things from it concerning blogging.”

“It’s not my first time to pay a visit this website, I am visiting this site daily and take good data from here all the time.”

“Sketches are genuinely nice source of teaching instead of passage–it’s my familiarity. What would you say?”

“Thanks for informative post. I am pleased, sure this post has helped me save many hours of browsing other similar posts just to find what I was looking for. Just I want to say: Thank you!”

“Your YouTube video lessons are well-known in whole globe, because it is the leading video sharing web site, and I turn out to be too cheerful by watching YouTube movies.”

“The YouTube film that is posted at this place has in fact a fastidious quality besides with a nice audio feature.”

“It’s just that their faith in humanity has been shaken, and they need a little help getting unstuck.”

***

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January 19, 2012

On Drumming, Primitiveness, Wood, And Overtones: Michael Gordon’s “Timber”

You could make the argument that percussionists are as defined by their musical actions as by the objects of those actions–by the fact that they percuss on whatever can be percussed upon. And they don’t just play snare drums, timpani, and xylophone either. Partly thanks to the influence of “world” percussion traditions (of Indonesia, sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Caribbean) on the aesthetics of twentieth century classical composers like Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, and many others into our current century, there is by now a substantial body of music for percussionists hitting everyday and unusual objects (not to mention indigenous instruments from musical cultures outside the western classical canon) to make music. As long as the object–a flowerpot, a brake drum, a plastic tube–is somewhat resonant and sounds good, you’re in business and ready to make music.

It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that percussion a played mostly decorative role in orchestral music–marking the tonic and dominant on the timpani, cymbal crashes at climactic moments of symphonies, and so on. It seems like it wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that percussion in classical music was allowed to come into its own, be itself, and not have to play, umm, second fiddle to anyone else in the orchestra. As Nicole V. Gagné points out in her fine essay, “The Beaten Path: A History Of American Percussion Music”, by the early twentieth century percussion in European classical music was “valued for its association with an idea—or rather, an ideal, be it mechanical prowess and progress, or non-industrial freedom and innocence.” So it was primarily those American composers such as Cowell, Cage and the others mentioned above (plus a few from overseas: Frenchman Edgard Varèse, and the Greek Iannis Xenakis), who helped expand the palette of what “counts” as a percussion instrument and as percussion music.

***

American composer Michael Gordon’s Timber (2011) is scored for six wooden 2 by 4s mounted on stands and amplified by small contact microphones. The pieces of wood have ancient precedents in the semantron, a long piece of resonant timber of Greek origin.

Pre-dating church bells, semantrons have been used for over a thousand years to call worshipers to prayer; indeed, versions of them are still used today in monasteries across Eastern Europe. So common are semantrons in monasteries that the historian Edward V. Williams describes them as “aural icons of orthodoxy.”

In light of semantrons’ ancient roots, it’s perhaps not surprising how often the word “primitive” comes up when Gordon and some of the percussionists who play Timber discuss the piece for six 2 by 4s. Here’s Gordon in an interview about the sound he was after: “I was almost imagining something primitively electronic.” And Michael McCurdy, percussionist with the Mantra percussion group: “There is a bit of a primitive feel when you’re playing this.”

So here we are in 2012 and Gagné’s primitive ideal is still with us: simple, ancient percussing, percussion instruments and percussive sounds signifying “non-industrial freedom and innocence” and marking a path of musical escapism. I don’t know the source of the primitive-drumming connection, but if I had to guess: drumming is an inherently more violent action than say, bowing the strings of a violin or blowing across a flute. Or maybe it’s that drumming is the most ancient of the instrumental musical arts. Or maybe we still unknowingly carry with us traces of the Eurocentric mindset of early European explorers and missionaries in distant (colonial) lands, unable to make sense of the “noise” of the “primitive” musical cultures they encountered. Suffice it to say that the percussive field–to use a phrase from John Mowitt in his book Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking–is still contentious and still has great social and psychological depths in need of comparative cultural study. After all, if we don’t think of ourselves as primitive, how can we continue to talk about music in such terms?

***

Nonetheless, Gordon’s Timber is neither primitive nor simple in its musical design and sound. The composed piece’s score gives precise directions to the performers, it has five movements, and runs for almost an hour (in this regard recalling Steve Reich’s four-part, hour-long 1971 piece, Drumming). Timber‘s structure makes use of repetition, shared rhythmic motifs and gestures passed among the players (e.g. moving from the outside edge towards the middle section of the 2 by 4s, or vice versa), and forms that audibly expand or contract. All of these elements help propel the piece forward and keep it interesting. In all, Timber is a pretty rapturous though at the same time austere piece of music that makes for challenging listening.

But the real star of Timber is its timbre or sound quality. One of the most compelling acoustic qualities of so-called “indefinite-pitched” percussion instruments such as cymbals, gongs, most types of drums, and semantrons is the complexity of their sounds. This complexity derives from the fact that the instruments produce not only a fundamental sound (the main pitch you hear) but also an array of overtones or harmonics (multiples of the main pitch that can also be heard). It’s these overtones that make a gong sound so mysterious and ineffable; indeed, overtones are the main reason why no two gongs sound the same.

So while Timber is not really a pitched piece with clear melodies and harmonies, those resonant 2 by 4s produce a complex field of overlapping, swirling and humming overtones that steal the show. If you attend closely to them you can perceive slow-moving, cloud-like melo-harmonic apparitions. In this way, Timber is spectral, ghostly music. Mantra percussionist Michael McCurdy again: ”Part of the beauty of this piece of music is the harmonic chorus that floats out into the audience and creates an absolutely rich timbre and texture and this amazing sound palette.”

Here’s a video about the piece:

Click here for another clip featuring a performance in the lumber department of a Lowe’s hardware store.

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January 17, 2012

On Perception, Presence, And The Creative Process: John Berger’s “Bento’s Sketchbook”


“I’m taking my time, as if I had all the time in the world. I do have all the time in the world.” – John Berger

John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (2011) is a meditation on the connections between seeing, feeling, and drawing, and how these connections shape how we perceive and make sense of the world. The book takes its inspiration from the writings of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza worked as an optical lens grinder by day, and in his free time wrote monumental philosophical tracts on rationality that helped pave the way for the Enlightenment. (Is there is a better argument for having a humble day job so you’re set up to do serious work in your spare hours?) Among Spinoza’s assertions: that God and Nature are one and the same, that body and mind are unified, and that there are three kinds of knowledge–opinion, reason, and intuition (only the intuitive type is “eternal”). Spinoza is widely considered to have made significant (and early) contributions to our understanding of how the mind works.

Spinoza–”Bento” to his friends–apparently kept a sketchbook, but it was lost to history and no one seems to know what was in it. Berger (1926-), an eminent English art critic (author of the classic Ways Of Seeing, among many other works of criticism and fiction) and a painter himself, was inspired to use Spinoza as his muse when a friend gave him a beautiful leather-bound sketchbook. This sketchbook got him wondering: What did Spinoza’s sketchbook look like? Bento’s Sketchbook dovetails around excerpts from Spinoza’s writings, and Berger’s own included sketches–of plants, people, paintings in galleries–are a kind of reply to Spinoza’s missing ones. These drawings are the starting point for Berger’s engagement with Spinoza’s thought through the reflections, inquiries and stories that comprise this brief book.

There are many amazing little ethnographic vignettes in Bento’s Sketchbook that demonstrate Berger’s wizardly powers of observation and writing. But my favorite sections are those that zoom in on the creative process–and I don’t use that phrase as a cliché either. Berger can really unpack things as only a practitioner (who can write) can. For example, near the beginning of the book he describes, and shows sketches of, a small flower in front of him that he’s in the process of drawing–a series of lines that question what is observed, accumulating “the answers” (8). And here is the fulcrum of the process: “At a certain moment…the accumulation becomes an image–that’s to say stops being a heap of signs and becomes a presence…This is when your looking changes. You start questioning the presence as much as the model” (ibid.). Then the refining begins. “You stare at the drawing…at what is radiating from [it], at [its] energy” (ibid.). You take in, in other words, its presence. The accumulative process continues as you add and subtract bits until the work feels finished and right.

No matter what artistic field you work in, there are a lot of sound observations in Bento’s Sketchbook to mull over. The challenge, as any artist/composer/writer/Maker of Things knows, is getting to that point where the thing’s presence starts to assert its energy back at you. You know when this is happening (“this is where the looking changes”): the music starts to play in your head when you’re somewhere else, or the ideas from the page keep repeating themselves silently. That’s presence asserting itself.

Berger also articulates some of the more ineffable aspects of artistic craft. In this passage he describes the intuitive naturalness (for lack of a better phrase) of his craft: ”When I’m drawing…I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function…a function that is independent of the conscious will…in something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning” (149).

And even though this is primarily a book about seeing and drawing, in synesthesia moments Berger uses tactile and sonic metaphors when describing the search for the right color: “You search touch by touch for a timbre…and then you discover whether or not when applied…the color matches the ‘voice’ you were searching for” (22; italics added).

In sum, there’s a quiet magic to Berger’s writing–the way he says the right thing with the least amount of fuss and filigree, leaving clear prose that rings in your mind like a bell long after it’s struck. By noticing the things that count–and making things count by noticing them–Bento’s Sketchbook invests simple gestures, everyday transactions, and common moments with massive grace and resonance.

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