Ah, Music Appreciation

How i have missed thee.

I've now taught 5 different courses, some technical (Music Applications for Computers/Intro to Music Tech I), some creative (Digital Audio and MIDI courses), but the pure fun of music appreciation just can't be matched.

As a music lover and educator, it's nearly the perfect circumstances. In college, Music Appreciation can usually fulfill a "gen ed" requirement. At Brooklyn College, they have "Core Curriculum" requirements that are split into a couple different courses you can take to fulfill. Music Appreciation is one of a few. The same is true at KCKCC.

Why does that create a nice environment? These students don't have to be there. Granted, their options are limited, but if they had no interest in music, there are other areas. of course there are other considerations- it may have been the only class the fits their schedule. Maybe it's the "least of all the evils" and the student still hates music.

Those are all possibilities.

But in any case, it's not like teaching English 101 (or whatever Comp I is). I've had many a friend teach that course. It's a requirement at almost every university. You either take it or pass out of it, but there is no way around the subject coming up. the question becomes how to get the required information to students while engaging them in a class that almost all do not want to be in.

I've got a better starting point. The students want to learn something about music. On top of that, a solid portion of the country enjoys listening to music. Maybe not Western Art Music, but music in general.

It's a bit easier to grab a crowd that wanders in with a little interest.

Oh, Music Appreciation, how i've missed you. Watching students puzzle over the question of "What is music?...Because, of course, we can't learn about a subject until we know what it is we are studying."

To watch everyone tap their feet and clap their hands and realize that it isn't some magic secret- it's just learning new words for what they already felt.

To see the looks of horror the first time you play Penderecki, or the screams of "This isn't music!" when i put on Cage's 4'33...and the ensuing discussion of the importance of questioning preconceptions of music and art. I'm sure some of my students get annoyed when they see my half grin, trying to force back a laugh, as they struggle with questions that too many musicians never even ask themselves.

And to see their eyes light up as math, physics, sociology, psychology, physiology, biology, etymology, semiotics, literature, history, and any other subject they could imagine is brought into the fold

And this is just what i do in the first two weeks

just wait till we hit organum

webpage sadness removed

So, it pays to wait, it appears.

I refused to renew my subscription for $34.99 a year at my old place. I put in for a transfer from another company. cost $9.99

It said it'd only take 48 hours

5 days later, I hadn't received an email. they email the admin to "ok" the transfer. Obviously, i am listed as the admin.

This morning, i got an email from my old provider saying "only $7.99 to renew for a year now!" I checked it out.

Yep, they marked it from $34.99 to $7.99! wtf? Even better?

5 years for $34.99.

needless to say, i now have my domain name for 5 years.

and the other service? i can hardly believe this part...they canceled the transfer and refunded me! WHOA! GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE?!? NO WAY!!!

so, even though i didn't end up using them, namecheap.com, i give you a quick shout-out for having good customer service. nicely done.

they say it's self-created stress...

So, for any that didn't know, I was a smoker

i would like to stress was

i haven't lit up in over a month. and, tonight was the first time since the first week of quitting that i have wanted a cigarette

They say that it's self-induced stress- that the reason for the "release from the stress, the calming sensation" is that you're going through withdrawal. Except, i didn't have that issue...or at least it didn't seem like it.

Even when i smoked a great deal, i didn't smoke every day. Sometimes, i'd go over a week without smoking. the main reason for the most recent quit was, well, not health related at all. it's called "being poor." and i didn't get cravings. I wasn't edgy or twitchy. The last month, other than some major snafus while trying to move, has actually been pretty damn good.

I haven't felt stressed at all.

Now, as i sit in my room, taking in the sauna that it is (the vent is in basically a short hallway pointing at the walls. GOOD JOB ON THE DESIGN DUMMY!), i want a cigarette. Why? The semester starts tomorrow. Both classes i teach meet tomorrow, and in one i actually have to lecture (gotta love those 3 hour classes). maybe that's it?

but i don't feel stressed. one of the classes i have taught for 2 semesters already. the other is a Digital Audio class at UMKC, and i had already pre-planned a great deal of what to do over the last couple months.

maybe it was the person i'd like to talk to more that popped on chat for 15 minutes an didn't say hello...I always have been stupid about emotions, even when i know it's completely ridiculous. What can i say, i'm an emotional guy...

Maybe it's the fact i'm sitting here, classes are about to start, and i haven't written any music since, oh...April. maybe?

Whatever it is, i don't even own a pack at the moment, so it doesn't matter. I'll fight the craving...

But i don't think it's from an addiction.

well, at least not a nicotine addiction

webpage sadness

So, my webpage is down. why?

cause the website i registered my domain name thru wanted $35 to renew.

so, yeah, that's INSANE.

So, no webpage for a bit. I'll get it up and running sometime, i hope

in other news, the new school year begins soon. All sorts of fun stuff. for those wondering, my class schedule is:

Teaching:

UMKC 235- Techniques of Electronic Music I- Digital Audio, Fall

UMKC 236- Techniques of Electronic Music II- MIDI and Synthesis, Spring

UMKC 33X- Topics in Electronic Music- Beginning Programming, Spring

KCKCC 110- Intro to Computer Music Applications, Fall and Spring

KCKCC 230- Music and Multimedia (though the name is changing), Spring

Taking:

Advanced Counterpoint- Baroque Era, Fall

Aesthetics and Analysis of Electronic Music, Fall

Tentative Spring:

19th Century Nationalism or Music 1900-1945

Comp Lessons

oh what a year this is shaping up to be.

the right of an artist to make a scene

There's quite a bit of hoopla around the cover art to Steve Reich's new album, WTC 9/11

for those unfamiliar with the cover, here's the cover release link

go through the comments for a bit and you'll see the wide ranging discussion- from using a tragic event to market an album, to discussion of how the image itself just looks tacky, to fighting for the artists right to use whatever material they want

Sequenza21 also posted the cover. the responses were equally broad there, from support to shame.

even Slate critic Seth Colter Walls jumped on this one, but from a "unique perspective"- someone who has...wait for it...ACTUALLY HEARD THE MUSIC! astounding...

the big one is that Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch, had his own reply.

i waited a bit to let my own thoughts be heard on the matter. in fact, if you couldn't tell, i basically took the summer off. but here's my 2 cents

first, this is not a commercialization of a tragedy, nor using an image to market a piece. This is an image chosen by a panel of people, the composer, the cover artists, the president of Nonesuch, that they felt best described the work.

second, i think that, as far as art goes, it's pretty lame. I agree with those stating that it looks like a beginner dropping a quick sepia filter on a photo to make it look all creepy. The original stock photo isn't of great quality, so some doctoring would probably need done.

third, there's a group saying "no one should use these images" and "it's too soon to look at anything this tragic." there are even those that cry out from far reaches of the US that "this is a personal tragedy and they are being taken advantage of."

ok, the comments from people that were THERE saying "this is a bit much for me." I GET that. I had a friend once, a former NYC firefighter, one of the first FDNY units to respond. His job was communications, so he stayed at the truck as his unit raced in to help people. He still gets flashbacks of watching the towers fall on his unit. For those people, the image may be too much. The music would probably be even more disturbing for them. And they have damn good reason.

Mr. "I watched the whole thing from my TV in Midwest USA, and i went to NYC once and saw the towers," you sir, don't have that attachment. if you DO have that attachment, it is false. It was made for you by the media. Sorry man. I'm pretty good at sympathy, but there are things i cannot comprehend. I cannot comprehend what it was like to go through the Holocaust. I can never understand the pain of child birth (kidney stones almost made me pass out. how the hell does a child come out?!? AND HOW DO WOMEN NOT JUST PASS OUT!!! That, my friends, is BALLS.)

I cannot comprehend what happened that day to the people there. Steve Reich felt personal pain. His apartment is nearby, his son, daughter in law, and granddaughter were in his apartment while Mr. Reich was in Vermont. There was no phone service. Finally, his neighbors, their family, and his family, were able to evacuate to Vermont.

I cannot comprehend this. I have no possible frame of reference. All i can say is "goddamn...that is freaking astounding. and you faced it, years later, and wrote a piece? a piece as haunting as your experience? well...shit..."

For all you bleeding hearts out there, you can't understand. and yet you tell a man who has been through it that his image is in poor taste because you are offended. I'm sorry, i don't buy it.

In the end, it's an artistic choice. someone once said "art is a mirror." I think it's attributed to Shakespeare, but i remember it from Joseph Campbell. It is a mirror; a mirror that reflects the observer. Why don't people like this image? What are they really rallying against?

Personally, i don't like the image, but from an "artistic" point of view. I'm with the group that says "that's a bad sepia filter giving it the archetypical post-apocalyptic feel. it's heavy handed." While some of Reich's music can be a bit heavy handed (his phasing pieces feel that way to me) others treat everything much more delicately (Different Trains, for instance). That's my issue with the cover art- it's just not as engaging. I think Walls had some great ideas in his article for Slate (especially the off the hook telephone.)

My friend Lizz had an even more disturbing thought- "what if the image had been a drawing by his granddaughter about the day? what she saw, what she thought?"

THAT disturbed me without even seeing the image. it could have been just swirls meant to depict the clouds of dust and i'd still cry. that is visceral. It's not a disconnected image of a plane about to crash and take it all down with a bad sepia filter. It's not an image we've seen every day. it's an image drawn ten years after the fact. granted, i believe his granddaughter was 1, so there probably isn't any real memory, but, it would be disturbing, no?

In the end, the piece of music is undoubtedly far more visceral, disturbing, emotional than the image ever could be. 95% people would listen to it and discount it cause "i don't get it" instead of just listening, being a part of the experience. Then again, when i played "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" for my music appreciation classes, even without telling them the name of the piece, they were disturbed. (i do find that funny, since that wasn't the original title.)

as artists, we don't have to back down to make something acceptable to PC audiences. I'm surprised my tape piece "Beijing 2008" hasn't hit some of the same types of attacks. It's pretty straight forwardly calling the anti-immigration stance in America one step from the same kind of crackdown that occurred in Tibet just prior to the Olympics. And yet no one has really said anything.

because it's music and i didn't come right out and say that in the music. and Reich dealing with this event through music is more than permissible. And yet, an image doing the same thing is not? where do we draw the line? What are we allowed to do when stating something artistically? don't be direct? don't be blunt? only abstract expression need apply?

I say the cover art is lame art, but as an expression, Steve Reich believes it goes with the music. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

Then again, when going through the comments, most people commenting (some even said "i've never heard of Steve Reich, but i think...") wouldn't have bought the album anyway. so, screw'em. Grow some balls, face the tragedy head on instead of burying it in the past, and listen to one man's story about the event and the image that he felt helped tell the story. maybe the idea is the view out the apartment window that day.

Maybe we're supposed to be disturbed

in response to...

This post is in response to 2 things, a review by my friend Chris Robinson on David Gibson's latest CD (read here) and the resulting discussion on tromboneforum.org, read here

An open letter to Chris Robinson:

You got some names going on that forum man. When Doug Elliott chimes in, you know things got real. Man, i was gonna buy a Doug Elliott mouthpiece...

Anyway, I couldn't agree more. Like i said before, one of my grump points is trombone players attempting to sound like J.J. Johnson. Smooth beyond all smooth, thin and bright tone. part of it is the instrument itself. straight horns tend to be a bit brighter, and it's easy to get a laser tone when trying to play out on them. on my horn, when i play loudly, it has a huge amount of edge to it (actually, mine is too far the opposite direction. anything above about a mf starts getting nasty...a little TOO soon. lol). On straight horns played in the higher registers, it just bets bright and thin to the point of being like a wailing baby. That's one of the biggest problems with the instrument- in a solo situation trying to play over everyone, we'll push it and we've killed 7 people in the crowd with a laser shooting from our horn.

It's one reason i have recently shied away from using my straight horn. i HAVE a jazz straight horn. It sits in the corner, comes out at least once a year, gets cleaned, then put back. I HATE my orchestral horn for various reasons, but one thing i like about it, is i can't get a laser tone out of it. Even in the high registers, it leans towards nasty and gritty. I might keep it around just to play jazz, just because of that nasty quality...and i can pump out mid to mid-low and make it sound like a bass trombones tone when they're really pumping the low stuff.

The best compliment i've gotten on my playing actually happened yesterday. I was just trying to play some high stuff while everyone was chatting, and Stanton Kessler stopped and said "what was that?" and i turned and said "me." his answer "that sounded like a French Horn." that, to me, is a great compliment. It means I was able to, in the high range where on all instruments it can get a little thin, keep a nice full, round, dark tone...the sort of tone that when you push it gets that brassy edge a French Horn has, not a baby killing laser beam.

I also completely agree with Doug Elliott when he says "What "we" are missing is quality, in a lot of ways. I'll probably get flamed for this, but as I see it, trombonists in general have accepted mediocrity as the norm."

couldn't agree more. We're a lazy bunch. Seriously. I am NO exception, either. My practice habits this summer went to 2-3 hours daily to an hour daily to an hour every few days. and that's me concentrating on practicing! i dunno how many trombone friends i've had who would rather get drunk, sit at a piano, and sing Billy Joel than practice trombone. and we've accepted it.

We've got this complex. We'll listen to (for classical) Alessi, Christian Lindberg, Mark Lawrence and say "eh, i'll never play like that. why bother?" We'll hear those classic jazz solos, J.J., Curtis Fuller, Slide Hampton, Jiggs Wigham, and Kai Winding and say "we'll never solo like that, why bother." I'll admit that i don't spend my time learning changes or practicing my soloing like i spend my time learning avant-garde modern trombone solos...and that means it gets little to no time.

It's a double-edged sword. i complain, as a trombone player, that there isn't much good music being written for the trombone. the parts are lame, the solos are few and far between (in classical lit and jazz improv), and no one is even asking if i would like a piece written for me these days...why?

We don't put ourselves out there. I think partly the greats got overshadowed- J.J.'s biggest years of success were in the Bop era, and then into the Time of Miles (as i like to call it...). even though he was playing actively, put out records, and had great press...We all remember Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, we remember Miles and Trane...the giants lived on, and the ogres just got overshadowed (same reason we remember Wagner over Meyerbeer...even though Meyerbeer had much more play time during his lifetime.).

The only answer is to get out there and change the perception. So, yeah, I agree with you in a million ways. And believe, as Doug Elliott inferred, the stigma is our own creation. Somehow, as trombone players, we get lazy. We reach a certain level of proficiency and call it good. we get a gig and call it a day. there are obvious exceptions, Ryan Heinlein and myself are both at least trying to break the mold a bit, i'd say...he's more active than me in the Jazz scene, but i'm trying to do the same type of thing in the classical scene (where the same problems exist...). Maybe our generation will fix it. maybe, maybe not. Who knows, but it is a problem that needs addressed. And, maybe, now that I'm older, i can do my part to break the cycle, rather than perpetuate it.

so easy...

to forget why we started this journey.

Last night threw an amazing party. Made Siracha Curry Burgers and other grilled meats. Made potato salad. All the food was well received. There was drinking.

Everyone in attendance last night is a composer.

We held a score burning. It was amazing that the other composers were more reticent to burn their scores.

I burned the conductors score used in the first performance of Dance of Disillusionment and Despair as well as the first editing copy.

They're both useless now, as I revised it again before sending it off for competitions.

Woke up late, haven't done anything today. Saw my good friend Scott Blasco had posted a video to his piece Four Songs from the Caucasian Chalk Circle. (you can view it here.) It is a fantastic piece.

Listening to Scott's music reminds me of why I got started down this crazy path. not the bit from undergrad where I was kinda writing, met Carlos, and he showed me the path in composition. not my Masters where i really put it together.

Not even HS, when i had to decide what college I wanted to attend and what major I would be.

Nope, back further. Back watching Der Ring des Nibelungen for the first time with my dad. Sitting at the piano struggling with simple etudes, just wanting to play from the different random volumes of piano pieces we had laying around.

Neither of my parents were "professional" musicians. My mom had piano lessons through HS and flute lessons through college. Almost had a music minor, but really just wanted to play for fun, so didn't do all the theory work needed. My dad was a guitarist and bass player for various bands, though none ever got past being much of a bar band.

I didn't take it seriously till halfway through college. But i've always loved music. Not passively in the "i want to just sit around listening," but i wanted to create music. First, as a player, now as a composer (and sometimes a performer.).

Scott's music is simple and beautiful. Not to say it doesn't have it's complexities and doesn't hold my attention. Far from it. However, there isn't a "hidden agenda" one must first learn before enjoying his music. I don't have to listen and realize "Oh, this is an inverted double mensuration canon!" to get joy from a piece. (Sorry Jeff. I know your love of the inverted double mensuration canon. I love it too. but it is in no way simple and straight forward. lol)

It's something I miss, that simple beauty of a piece. You lay 4 of your 5 cards on the table and it looks like you have 2 pair. That's a good enough hand to win many a game. For those that pay attention, saw how the game unfolded, and catch that wry smile on your face, they know you've got another Jack in your hand, and it's a full house.

That's Scott's music. everyone can see the two pair. If you pay attention, you realize he's got a full-house.

My music is like playing Texas Hold'em and waiting for the river to pull out a winning hand. And no one ever sees what i'm holding till the end...

Sometimes I forget why I got into this whole mess..."Rainbow Connection" on an inexpensive upright, the fun and difficulty of memorizing 10 pieces for a competition, sitting in my bedroom with a cheap Casio keyboard writing short songs with their various patches and recording them with the little two track record function and recording it to a cheap tape deck.

I'm too complicated now. Not sure that'll ever change. I'm jealous of my friends that have success in singer/song-writer style work (guys like Greg Gagnon and his folk/country/blues persona Graham Gregory.).

I think it's time to get back to those roots. remember why I got into this mess. Thank you, Scott Blasco, for reminding me again.