A project of personal musical formation.

One of the books I’ve most enjoyed reading the last few years was Brad Mehldau’s Formation: Building a Personal Canon Part I (I eagerly await the publication of Part 2). It is a remarkable memoir that weaves together his own life story up through his 20s with the experiences of music that formed him into the musician he is. With incredible forthrightness he chronicles the bullying of his childhood, the sexual assault he experienced at the hands of his high school principal, the many years of coming to grips with this through risky sexual activity, then his descent into a heroin addiction that dominated his 20s. It is not an easy read, but he manages all of this without being prurient or self-pitying.

Throughout he writes beautifully and insightfully about experiencing music from his earliest memories to playing in NYC clubs as an emerging force in the modern jazz scene.

Reading it has helped me reflect on my own musical formation a bit. The most influential forces in my life as a musician have been albums that captured my attention and drew me into their world over and over again, making irresistible the draw to make a life in music. Most of these were recordings, many were scores I played, and a very few were live performances. By far the larger part were recordings. This project is a look back at some of the albums that were most important to me as I grew up.

Part I: Introduction, A Life of Listening

I believe there have been two great historical declensions in Western music: before and after the development of notation and before and after the invention of recording. Of these two, I would argue that recording is a much more impactful invention. If nothing else, it has had a broader impact since it is not just a technology for composers and performers but for everyone who enjoys music.

For someone who grew up relatively far away from the centers of culture, recordings were the key to my musical formation. I started listening to music before the iPod, so CDs were my first way into music. With limited access to the internet (and too many scruples for piracy), a BMG membership was my portal to the world of sound. The hours I spent agonizing over what albums I would choose for my monthly $6.99 cd, or a 12 for $3.99 each deal. The chores I did so that I had the money to spend on these!

Christmas of 2007 brought me the 30GB iPod Video. This didn’t change my relationship to CDs as much as make them much more portable. From this point on I was listening to music all the time. There is some music I purchased digitally (before the Starbucks gift card was a standard small gift the iTunes gift card was preeminent), but the music I really absorbed almost all came to me on CDs, which I ripped to my computer, organized and labelled (the earliest iTunes couldn’t download track information, you had to sit there with the jewel case or liner notes and type in each track!), and synced to my iPod. This syncing of course required a cord, because the iPod video could not access the internet. This was a ritual of near religious importance to me.

I had it in white. It shipped with the worst headphones ever devised.

In my teenage years I was generally either playing basketball, playing the guitar, or listening to music while doing something else. An enormous advantage of being homeschooled was that I had music going basically all the time while doing schoolwork. It also meant I could do my school work quickly and leave more time for basketball and music. Even with that extra time, I was most often practicing from about 10PM-12 or 1AM. This was partly personal preference and partly that during sports seasons the days were just very full.

This was also before any kind of streaming service was available, so the music you had available to listen to was owned or borrowed. Our tiny public library had a remarkably good selection of contemporary classical records curated by one of the libarians who had very hip tastes (nearly a whole shelf of Argo, Bis, Nonesuch, and ECM New Series recordings). In a full circle moment, a few Christmases ago I was visiting and took my kids to the library to play in the children’s area (it was freezing cold outside). By the entrance was a table of CDs being given away for free. Gavin Bryars, Michael Torke, Alfred Scnittke, many of the same CDs I checked out as a high schooler were there with date stamps in the mid-2000s as the last time they circulated. That is to say, before they became part of my permanent collection I (or one of my brothers) was the last person the check them out.

So whenever the mood strikes me, I’m going to go to my record/CD cabinet and pull out something that was a huge deal to me as a kid and write a bit about it. I don’t have a list, I’m just going to follow my gut and my ear.

In the opening autobiographical sketch of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne details the years he served as Surveyor of the Salem Custom-House, a political appointment he held for three years. It could have been a cushy gig for the rest of his career if he played his cards right, but he was soon removed after angering the wrong people in a new administration.

The conceit of this sketch is that the outline of the novel (and indeed the artifact of the scarlet letter itself) came to him in a bundle of papers found in what amounted to the Custom-House archives. In the unfinished attic there were bundles of papers from the years of invoices, manifests, and shipping lists that were processed by the officials there. Hawthorne is aware that his port is past its prime - the heaps of papers are evidence of a once bustling trade done in Salem that has since moved on to other ports of entry closer to the growing cities. He is indeed one of the only young men who works in the Custom House. Most of his colleagues (who he senses have a mild resentment at his being their superior) spent their vigorous years at sea as captains or mates. They’ve seen magnificent port cities abroad and ridden forty foot swells. Now though, they live with sedentary bodies and their minds must feast on the past for nourishment.

This sense of boredom in a boring job is a blessing and a curse. Hawthorne is aware of the generous compensation for the amount of work required. An endnote gives his official daily responsibilities as 3.5 hours of work (almost shocking to our 9-5 culture) but we sense it doesn’t even fill these scanty hours. His retrospect seems torn between the ease of what was essentially a sinecure and his now having to hustle about writing and selling stories to make a living.

His unease with the whole situation is displayed in his unflattering portrait of his predecessors at the helm of the Custom House. He has much to say about their personal faults and lack of character. While the retired sea captains at least have a life of hard going sea work behind them to bolster their image, the previous surveyor was only a glutton. His God was his belly and nothing else.

His love for food is such that when not actually eating his only available topic of conversation is recollections of past meals. He recounts in vivid detail the smallest morsels that pleased his palate in meals past as if he is savoring them once again. Everyone here might live in the past, but at least the seamen have a past worth speaking of. They have done real work, even if now they just shepherd papers from ship’s clerks to their resting place in the attic.

Perhaps it is this aura of nostalgia (and his more than average interest in the written word) that piques the younger Surveyor’s interest in the piles of papers unceremoniously housed in the garrett. Sifting through them leads only to dismay, however. They are nothing but the effluence of a functionary office. The literal pro forma detritus of an administrative state he is now a small part of.

He recognizes that perhaps the records are of some historical interest (how many hogshead of sugar passed the docks of Salem in a given year) as a record of human activity, but that as a matter of human creativity they are utterly dull. Reading them, he understands that the enterprise of the Custom House and his post contribute nothing to his personal development.

His depictions of his colleagues past and present at first seems snarky and even cruel, but really they are motivated by fear. Fear that he will become one of these functionaries in the mechanics of commerce, which to him is a diminishment of his humanity. All the while, he struggles with his desire for a secure income in an undemanding job (remember, dear reader, 3.5 hours a day!).

This illustrates why the discovery of a scrap of narrative and a handmade artifact are so arresting. What could this human accessory, and one we later learn is beautifully wrought, be doing in an archive otherwise devoid of human interest? Why would such a thing be saved, and in the Custom House of all places?

Discovering the narrative outline accompanying it sets his imagination moving. The fragment isn’t enough to understand the full story, but it sketches a bare outline. Just enough for him to begin to glimpse the shape of it and to start giving it full form. Hawthorne’s true passion as a writer of stories is instantly rekindled and he cannot stop considering this story. His obsession increases as he tries to fill in the details and make a complete tale out of it.

He quickly finds challenges. Fleshing out (or “bodying forth” in one of Malcolm Guite’s favorite phrases) the story while working the tedium of his functionary job in an unfunctioning port has stunted his ability to create. The details are dim, the narrative arc does not come easily. Though he takes his usual long walks and sits at his desk he finds his mind dulled and resistant to imaginative work.

He senses that his hours in the Custom House are diminishing his formerly prodigious technique. Gracefully, he doesn’t have to find the wherewithal to resign his post, the incoming administration does it for him (he was also less than able at politics it seems).

After returning to civilian life his mental acuity returns only gradually. Through walking, reading, and attempts at writing (and now with the urgency of bills due) he slowly reignites his imagination until he can finally give form to the novel that follows.

In a 2015 book, David Graber proposed the concept of Bullshit Jobs (if one were to coin a less vulgar term I would appreciate it). I have not read the book (I suspect it is a book length blog post) but the idea is that our corporatized work-world has room for many workers who essentially do nothing of significance. Mere functionaries to organizational custom, machination, and short-term problem solving. Some of these are “email jobs,” which consist primarily of answering questions or providing information that could be answered in some other way, but it’s convenient for someone to just email you. Many are related to appearances or exist purely for redundancy. Even more onerous are the myriad jobs related only to managing compliance and liability.

During the covid shutdown there were a number of people who confessed (via anonymous accounts of course) that they did essentially no work for their full-time remote jobs. A reddit thread collected stories of those fully “employed” who talked about what they did all day. Log in, read blogs, watch YouTube. Whatever they want, as long as they could be contacted by a superior in the rare even they were assigned a task. One related that after having about 3 hours worth of work per day for a year, he was promoted to lead a team of himself and two other “workers.” He was not assigned any more tasks, so he did one hour of work himself and delegated the others to each of his “reports” (as the corporates love to call persons below them on the status ladder). As long as they kept their mouths shut, he admonished, they could all have a great life. Pick up some hobbies, enjoy the days, or even get another full-time job and double your income.

Though a few centuries early to the conversation, Hawthorne is describing his time in a BS job. The inclusion of this long, seemingly unrelated essay as formatter to one of the greatest novels is unusual. The essay is about the personal effects he suffered from taking one of these jobs. What does Hawthorne’s personal struggle with creativity have to do with the story that follows?

One of the themes of The Scarlet Letter is how we know others and who they really are. Surface-level judgement leads to the harsh treatment of Hester, who bears the undeniable outward sign of her sin and thus the outward branding of it as well, while Dimmesdale is able to manage his image to the townspeople to maintain approbation. His true character must be revealed by supernatural intervention.

Hawthorne hints at this theme in The Custom-House:

But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.

The quality of relationship we have with others determines the amount of ourselves we reveal. Hawthorne held his dusty old coworkers with some flavor of contempt, as indeed he held himself in this position as well. He felt like his inner life was struggling, but his relationships to those around him were also flawed. The circumstances of their relationship meant its quality would be poor.

Imagine the kind of relationships someone doing a remote email job has with her colleagues. Having never met any of them in person, primarily interacting through screen-based text, and avoiding actual work and interaction at all costs. And some admit to only doing this an hour or two a day. Can this even be called a relationship? Nothing of the self is revealed in this work, and it is the revelation of the self to others that we need for a flourishing life. This of course is best done in family and convivial settings, but having divorced our working life from all meaningful relationships must leave us with an impoverishment impossible even for Hawthorne to imagine. Maybe one of the reports to whom you send delegatory emails used to be a ship’s captain on the high seas. How would you even know?

This plays out in the book as well. Dimmesdale’s public relationship with the people of Massachusetts Bay means that his true self cannot be revealed without destroying his life and calling. Hidden sin, and therefore disrupted relationships, dominates his life. It is only in the secrecy of the forest and in the relief of confession that we ever hear from the real Arthur Dimmesdale. His job, though itself a noble calling, is rendered a BS job because of his unfitness for it by his inability to reveal himself to others. The plot to flee Massachusetts Bay and start a new life elsewhere would be destined to fail because he brings this secret with him wherever he goes.

Chillingworth’s secret identity (spoiler: he is Hester’s husband) places him permanently as an outsider. He hides himself behind his status as an alchemist, work regarded with suspicion, to make concealing his identity to the townsfolk easier. He knowingly takes advantage of the surfeit of puritan suspicion to avoid identification. His alchemy is a front to keep others at bay and to lure Dimmesdale, willing to seek relief anywhere, in to be tormented.

It is only Hester who lives with nothing to hide. She wears her A so all know what she has done, and its product, her wild daughter Pearl, is always alongside as further reminder. But because she has no secrets, she moves at ease with the people. She seems immune to their shaming because she has been truthful. Unlike all the men of the story, hiding the truth about herself was not an option available to her. (That she exercises this ability in not revealing her partner in this sin is another topic for another essay.)

But she has a further power to relate to the townsfolk: her work. However despised she may be, no one can deny the quality of her needlework. She does embroidery for the magistrates and wealthiest citizens, who, despite their sense of moral superiority, are happy to support her with their custom.

Hester is the only of the main characters whose work is not a front for something else. Dimmesdale covers his sin with public piety and position. Chillingsworth hides his identity and true purpose in alchemy. It is only Hester, who does good work with her hands, who can live at peace with others in a relationship unobscured by deceit.

And it is this skill she uses to adorn, by her own hand, her own fate in gold thread and flourishes: “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.”

This personal essay is a few years old. I’m reposting it today on the 6th anniversary of my grandfather’s funeral.

Each year as I get older I catch glimpses of my grandfather’s hands in mine. He had a habit of holding his resting hand in a relaxed fist, palm upward, while working on something. I apparently do the same thing, and sometimes when I look down I recognize someone else’s gesture, though his hands have been in the ground for three years today.

He lived a life where hands were important. In his vocation as a family doctor his hands held both the newborn and dying beyond count. As one of the few doctors in a rural area, he likely touched a high percentage of Union County North Carolina residents during his fifty year practice. He was fond of taking out an old invoice he had sent a family in his first years as a doctor. They called during a West Virginia blizzard and he walked several miles to their home with his black bag to deliver a baby. He charged them $12.00 (two dollars more than the typical birth since he made a house call), but was pretty sure they never paid since they didn’t have any money at all.

Though a physician by trade, he was a farmer at heart. This is how I knew his hands and watched him work. Retired from practicing medicine at age 80, he kept a vigorous schedule of chores around his 200 acres well into his nineties. Much of this was gardening, feeding animals, and otherwise keeping busy. He never seemed to tire of daily chores though he had done them countless hundreds of times over the decades. Seeing the fish in the pond jump for the floating food by the hundreds never failed to put a smile on his face as he broadcast handfuls across the water from a bucket.

We enjoyed participating in these chores because of the novelty. They were a break from our small town rhythms. He seemed to enjoy them in their regularity. He knew his day’s work and did it with his own hands. The last time I did chores with him he was ninety-eight years old. We tended to grape vines he had just planted, pruning away the shoots that would absorb nutrients but not bear fruit. He expected the first harvest was several years away.

The day’s chores ended, he would spend the evening indoors with the news or a basketball game on while he read his newspapers. Eventually a bowl of fruit would appear from the kitchen and he would sit on the bed with his knees up peeling apples and pears and handing you a slice. He had a way of peeling an apple in a circular motion so that the skin would sometimes come off in a single long coil. It looked easy, but when I tried it I realized it is only easy to someone who has done it each evening for a lifetime.

The result of this lifetime of faithful chores was a place. A place with meaning because of the work done in it and the time spent together. A place loved by every member of the family.

The morning of his funeral I stood at the guest house kitchen window brushing my teeth when the great blue heron flew by. It was the first time I cried that day. Grandpa loved that bird. Every sighting would come with his whisper, “Look!” In January of 2021, a strange year later, I am reading an Eric Carle book to my son for bedtime. A painting of a blue heron makes my throat catch.

Back in January of 2020, driving from the funeral home to the cemetery, the hearse took the long way and drove by grandpa’s house. Slowly, it ascended the pecan lined driveway and made one lap around the house. A person firmly rooted to his place saying goodbye. After the burial we returned to the house and walked the land for the last time.

I left the farm with something. Grandpa’s brown suede jacket was on the coat rack. “This looks like it will fit you,” a cousin said, and it did. I am one of the few grandsons with his scrawny frame so it became mine. I don’t know how many years Grandpa wore this jacket but it is worn in without being close to worn out. The leather is thick and soft. I expect it will last the rest of my life and perhaps beyond.

Our South Carolina climate doesn’t allow many days when its weight is necessary. On the coldest days I put it on, never without thinking of him. I reach for it on a brisk Sunday morning just before the three year anniversary of his death. When I put my hands in the side warming pockets it always occurs to me that my hands are where his hands would be, and looking more like his each year.

I think of this as I drive down Laurens Road. Stopped at a red light, the largest great blue heron I have ever seen flies past though there isn’t any water nearby.

Increasingly, I am finding myself moved by efforts to humanize and dignify people in all their situations and forms. Perhaps it is the steady march of “AI” to seemingly every niche of our lives (every YouTube and podcast ad is for the newest AI enabled tools to supercharge your ability to turn profits for your boss’s boss’s boss), along with the deeply antagonistic approach to people that our national leadership take on nearly everything. Either way, there have been a few times recently when I have encountered people seeking humanity over power, over wealth, over convenience, and been moved by it.

Here are a few I highlight for your attention:

When Life Begins With Death, Plough

Veronika Kabas profiled a hospital in Vienna that provides palliative care to children born under the expectation that they will die at or shortly after birth. This is an option provided only by the heroic efforts of Sister Teresa Schlackl, a nun and the hospital’s Chief Ethics Officer. Her mission is to dignify the life of every child and parent with the option to carry a potentially non-viable pregnancy to birth and to spiritually and physically care for the child and parents. The couple featured in the story were urged by their doctor to terminate the pregnancy in the second trimester when significant brain abnormalities were detected. Determined to carry to term, they not only had a live birth but were able to take their daughter, Anna, home for nearly a year before she died. Johannes, Anna’s father, says, “The beautiful thing about our story is that for us, there are no unanswered questions. Anna’s story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” What a gift. A grace.

Sometimes I use the phrase “doing the Lord’s work” flippantly (a bad habit to get a laugh), but these folks are doing the Lord’s work in one of the most profound ways I can imagine. Treating the unborn (and their parents) as people to be cared for and heaving against the standard of “care” and the entire national medical establishment that would rather them not see the light of day. 

Engineering at Home, Sara Hendren ( @ablerism ) and Caitrin Lynch

This is a website documenting the adaptive devices a woman named Cindy uses after medical complications that left her with significant physical disabilities in all four limbs. She was fitted with the latest of robotic prosthetics, but found that the devices that helped her the most were often much simpler, low-tech devices (often of her own design). Items like a high friction board that helps her hold a newspaper and turn the pages, or a small but strong handle to help her get in and out of her car.

The invention I found most moving though was a pen holder that allowed her to write by hand. Though proficient with voice-to-text typing, she had always been a card and letter writer and missed the personal touch of a hand-written note. A bit of leftover silicone with a hole to hold a pen at the correct angle was all she needed to write again. And remarkably, her handwriting is recognizably still hers as it was before her disability. This small piece of silicone gave her a piece of her personality back. She can send a note to a friend and they know from the writing on the envelope that it’s from her.

The manifesto is well worth reading.

The third is a personal experience; it happened a few years ago but I have thought about it many times since. Shortly after moving to South Carolina I was in a municipal office of some kind waiting to register something other. The kind of chore you have in spades when you’ve emigrated states and you just can’t wait to be done interfacing with the bureaucracy. An elderly Black woman was also waiting and greeted me with the most generous smile and kindness. We chatted a few minutes (I learned a lot about appropriate greetings and small talk from the church ladies in Baltimore). She just dripped goodness and grace. The kind of person who can only be described as spirit-filled. It was just a few moments, but it filled me with light. Right there in the Greenville county office complex.

Much later it struck me that this woman was old enough to have lived through several decades of the Jim Crow south and the years that followed it. She had, in all likelihood, experienced despicable things at the hands of people who looked a lot like me. She certainly has friends and family who did. But she didn’t treat me as them. She treated me like a person, going far above and beyond the normal conventions of public friendliness. And in so doing, helped me recognize her as a person with a history and complexity and a relationship to this state and country that is probably very different from my own. And yet here we were together, and from pure generosity of spirit, she made my day.

(I wrote this to convince some of my IRL friends who “follow” my substack account to come join us here on the free web. For those of you reading on Micro.blog this is of course the very definition of preaching to the choir.)

Before I begin, ask yourself a question: are you happier with the things you do on the internet now than you were 10 years ago? How about 20 years ago? What was your internet life like in 2006? Would you take that over the current situation if you could?

One of the best things I’ve read so far this year was a piece by Joan Westenberg called The Case for Blogging in the Ruins. The ruins, of course, are the internet. Or more specifically, the siloed reactive waste sites we have been taught to call social media. The places of the internet that for many people are the internet and for younger people are the only web they have ever known. Despite its very good qualities, substack is starting to look and act more like these other areas. (Alan Jacobs was right, as usual, substack won’t save us.)

In Joan’s piece she argues that one of the most radical actions one can undertake in the current version of the web is blogging. To write things and post them to a website you own, and see what happens. Often nothing will. Sometimes a few people will read and one or two will respond thoughtfully. Sometimes a discussion begins in the comments, and when things get really exciting someone will write a counterpost on their blog.

This describes the first version of the web I encountered and grew up using. Exchanges of information and ideas, along with recording and recounting the everyday of our lives. The blogosphere.

In the early blogging days no one could conceive of a following of millions. The savvy among us installed hit counters at the bottom of their blogs and made special posts when 1000 people had visited the blog in all of history. Blogs considered wildly popular would have hits in the tens of thousands. It was a project of human scale, mostly among friends with a few likeminded strangers joining in. (A writing tick many of us used was something like, “to the three people reading this.”)

Back in October I set out to finally fix some issues I’d been having with my Wordpress website and decided it was time to scrap it and start again. This led me to host my site on micro.blog, which also has a limited social feature that is a lot like twitter was pre-algorithm (a certain world’s-wealthiest-man gets a lot of heat for the state of twitter, but forget not that it was a garbage heap long before he supercharged the worst aspects of it). A chronological timeline, posts only from those you choose to follow. NO ADS. There are no advertisements. You don’t see anything in your feed that is advertising products, services, or paid subscriptions.

And everyone there is a blogger to some extent because the thing that holds the network together is the individual URLs of each person. We all have our own little piece of internet to create and maintain, and you can say hey to your neighbors and chat back and forth about the things you’re making. It’s like a front porch, a quadrangle, a book club. It is an open network (the term of art is Federated) so you can follow people on any other open network or even any RSS enabled blog.

The other thing is, no one is making or trying to make money at it. The substack feature that has caused all of its problems is that at its heart it is an engine for monetization. And for many people, that is great. Lots of people have scraped together enough followers to make a little side cash or even a living. Ted Gioia can buy a private island with his newsletter lucre. I am genuinely happy that more people can make an independent living writing. But wherever gold is found, prospectors follow, bringing their saloons and whorehouses with them.

There is no gold in the blogosphere. Nobody is there grifting.

One of the most amazing things about blogging again is that it has encouraged me to think in different ways. PJ Vogt’s *Search Engine* podcast did an episode about The Fediverse recently. In it PJ says, “Twitter makes you think like a bumper sticker, Instagram makes you think everyone is hot and on vacation.” The tool shapes the man.

How does a blog make you think? At least in paragraphs. And occasionally making connections between different things, or noticing things. And then having a place to think about that in writing a bit. Maybe someone else will resonate. Maybe they won’t, but you will have spent time doing something worthwhile.

Most men wouldn’t be caught dead in makeup—then they are, laid cold in a coffin for final display.

A spruce wears lights and stars only in the short frantic weeks between the lot and the curb.

Just one more tree until sacralized by impulse hardened bow saw teeth and icons of family and rituals passed and passing.

Baptized to a calling echoed in the myths of trees but hardly worthy a seven-year sapling otherwise destined (in some decades) to be a light pole or flare of fire;

Maybe a 2x4 that nobly holds a wall of the family home where a distant cousin or great-grandchild one day stands in temporary juvenile honor.

Another, spared enough days and a straight place to grow, could be a fine violin and make rosin for the bow.

Each day for years you dress yourself until one day someone picks out your last suit, like your first Christmas or Easter.

But in your last suit you won’t squirm against the too-tight collar or fret about the press of the pleats and color of the tie.

Until then will you struggle and fight, or gradually—gracefully, gratefully— drop needles on the carpet until someone says, “It’s time.”

In the most recent issue of the Guitar Foundation of America’s Soundboard Magazine (which isn’t available online) there is an article that has some real twaddle in it. The kind of thing that sounds impressive and passes for analytical insight, but is essentially meaningless.

Discussing the different issues surrounding historically informed interpretation of the music of Bach the author states the following:

We cannot fully understand the ideas of Bach or his contemporaries, because we, as modern listeners and performers, operate from a fundamentally different historical vantage point—one shaped by centuries of evolving musical interpretation.

Which is—obvious? How everything in the world works? And presupposes that there is some ultimate understanding of Bach that apparently his contemporaries could understand since they were of the same vantage point. Despite the fact that Bach’s music was generally unliked (even if respected) in his own day and distinctly unfashionable.

Does 200 years of performing, editing, recording, analyzing, and interpreting the music of Bach give us a lesser or greater understanding of the music? It took an interpreter like Pablo Casals to bring the Bach cello suites to broader attention. He quite literally found the music there that everyone else had ignored. Why was he able to do this? Probably because he (as an inheritor of the romantic tradition of interpretation) took it upon himself to interpret the music using his own taste and acculturation as a guide. And he had immaculate taste. Though clearly of their time, his interpretations are still vivid and arresting. The rich product of nearly fifty years of practice, performance, and contemplation.

(An historical sidenote: his first recording session occurred at Abbey Road Studios, a few decades before it would become the recording home of the Beatles. Casals (born in 1876) disliked recording and could only be convinced to do so because his political commitment to democracy and against fascism meant he refused to concertize in his native Spain, Germany, Italy, or Russia, effectively putting his European concert schedule on hold in the 1930s. More notes here. I can’t recommend Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach enough if this interests you).

Very little scholarship (particularly manuscript scholarship) had been done when Casals discovered the suites in a secondhand store. He developed an interpretation from the version of the score he had, and he found deep riches there. Did Anna Magdalena (Bach’s second wife and the presumed recipient of the suites) understand this music more than Casals? A fascinating and unanswerable question. Her cello playing—like every note of music ever played before recording technology, and the vast majority of them since—is lost to history. There is a very real possibility that Bach would have liked her playing more than Casals, but we would prefer Casals (or Rostropovich or Maisky or Ma or whoever you like). There is very little doubt that our modern masters play at a technical level unthinkable to Bach in his time. (In her defense, A.M. had a lot of kids to raise).

Later in the article he quotes a paper that gives a symbolic analysis of the fugue from BWV 997 (it concerns the elements in the first ten seconds of this recording). According to one person, this music apparently means the following:

1. Five diatonic notes: symbolic of human perfection
2. Saltus duriusculus / descending seventh: representing the Fall of Adam
3. Five chromatic notes [in the higher voice]: signifying pain and suffering after the Fall
4. Quotation of the chorale theme Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, evoking the salvific act of Christ
5. Resolution through a descending fifth: symbolizing Divine Grace [also one of the most formulaic of all cadence gestures]

I haven’t read the paper this comes from so I can’t answer if there is any documentary evidence from Bach that this is the case or if it is just a hunch by the writer. (I’ve read other symbolic analyses like this before and they are usually based on hunches). I’m also not categorically opposed to these kinds of interpretations, as long as they are presented as interpretive and not as an absolute musical truth. Some performers find this kind of representation very helpful. I get a good shiver from a saltus duriusculus just as much as the next guy. But absent some kind of evidence, or the greatest clue of all—lyrics, we can’t read Bach’s mind on what he intended. Especially not down to this level of granular meaning.

The author of the article can’t take that reasonable approach though. He comments, “for the performer, awareness of these rhetorical and symbolic dimensions is essential to an expressive and historically informed interpretation.”

This is so obviously not true I’m amazed it passed editorial. I’ve played this piece in utter ignorance of this possible symbolism and I daresay it was expressive. In fact, I wrote a substantial analysis of the form of this piece (it’s a da capo fugue, quite unusual) and brought many insights from that to bear on my performance. Alas, the fact that this all happened before the above was proposed means that my performance was helplessly inexpressive.

One of the unexpected goods of having children is the way is teaches you how to value your time. The daily growth and transformation of an infant breaks us completely from the relative sameness of one adult day after the next. A “busy season” of half a year might take you away from a quarter of a toddler’s life. John Muir said of the great American forests “nothing dollarable is safe,” and this is surely most true of our time. Everyone is trying to dollar our time (even in it’s smallest moments of “engagement”) but the time of a child is profoundly undollarable and to miss it such a high cost.

The thing children need is attention and attention is the spending of time. The poet David Whyte says “the only way to change the past is the quality of attention you give to the present.” Our past is created in the present. If you don’t want to regret missing the days of your children being young you can only accomplish that right now by saying no to something and giving them your time as it passes. If you have a choice (many do not) you are paying at a punishing exchange rate to be so busy now that you miss those few precious moments of early life.

Though there are fewer things now than ever that I’m willing to be dogmatic about, I feel absolutely certain that there is no amount of putting your phone away that you will regret. All its enticements are shallow and vapid, they do not transform the past in a positive way. One of its main functions is to strip the present of any depth and vibrancy. We view our surroundings between sips of amusement, always wondering if the new thing on the screen is more exciting than our static environment. It never is, it only seems that way because we have failed to give a high quality of attention to our surroundings.

Think about it and you will see that this is right. What sweet memories do you have of time spent clutching your phone, hunching your spine and squinting at the glow?

I read somewhere that by age 12 a child has, on average, spent 75% of the time with her parents she ever will. By age 18 is is 90%. Those numbers seem about right to me. I’m not sure if we have much control over changing those ratios, but we can certainly change how much time each of them contains.

When it comes to children, there is no later. There is only now, quickly becoming the past.

“Words and numbers have unchallenged cultural hegemony. It is our job to promote the importance of sounds!”

This was the battle cry of Vern Falby, one of the teachers I encountered in grad school that had a profound influence on my musical thinking. All of his theory classes were called “Thinking By Ear” followed by whatever the topic of the class actually was. They were very untraditional classes. The text was created by him and mostly consisted of work scores annotated with various “discovery procedures” that he invented to “suss out” (a favorite phrase of his) the inner workings of the piece. After doing many practice scores we would make Shenkerian reduction scores without using the notation. We would listen and sing the middle-ground lines to understand the melodic structure under the surface notes. This was one of only two times in 10 years of collegiate study I was asked to analyze music by ear. (The other was self-imposed because I wanted to write about a piece that did not have a score available).

His approach was his own, and required significant buy-in of time. Results varied for students. For me though, it worked, and it changed how I thought about many things. It was the first time I was truly challenged to do my analysis by ear and parse a form without consulting a score (we once spent several weeks of class listening to the first moment of Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto because someone asked a question about double-exposition form and he had never done one in class before. I have still never looked at a score but I know the form like the back of my hand). He had no interest in observations from the score that we could not actually hear when listening to the piece.

I bring this up because I have encountered an attitude among my students that the score is necessary for a deep understanding of classical music. I think this reveals two things: the kinds of training they have received and the quality of listening they are doing.

There is a historic connection between the growth of literacy and diminishing of memory. It was expected that by age 8 to 10 a young boy in the early medieval era would be “psaltered,” that is, would have memorized the 150 Psalms. It was not unusual for a poet to be able to reproduce an epic of several thousand lines after a single hearing. Even if these individuals were able to read, most things could not be read either because they were not written down or access to written works was so difficult. The only option to store information was in the memory, so it stayed in tip-top shape. (Another topic for another day is the techniques of memory that we have lost.)

Musical memory is no exception. I have played with folk and jazz musicians who can absorb a song in one hearing (including 32 bar changes, which is quite a feat). Most classical musicians I know cannot do this. It takes them many times around before a melody really sticks, much less harmony and all the other information needed.

I am a heavily notation-reliant musician, but in genres where it makes sense I have moved toward working by ear as much as possible. The side effects are surprising. For one, if I learn a song by ear I don’t forget it. There are standards I figured out years ago and can still easily sit down with a guitar to play through. There are other standards I have looked up in the Real Book to play, and I couldn’t even begin to play them without looking again. A favorite phrase of one of my guitar teachers, Christopher Berg, is “recall is more powerful than review.” This is an essential learning principle. You have to make your brain do the work of remembering something or it won’t (anyone remember any phone numbers anymore?). Recall is a muscle in extreme atrophy because of the access to information we are never without.

It seems to me that we should be doing as much listening as score watching in our classes. I think we are perhaps reluctant because working on paper feels legitimizing in the academic setting. When STEM majors are doing advanced calculations and practicing surgery on robotic patients we can’t just sit in class and listen to music, can we? We can, and we should. Analytical listening is exactly the skill we should be building. We might assume our students are doing it, but I wasn’t and I doubt today’s students are either.

As a rule, I don’t set New Year’s Resolutions, but occasionally a maxim to guide the year emerges.

This year’s maxim: The right way to do something is the easiest way.

This is primarily a statement against deferment. Deferred costs, deferred maintenance, deferred effort. Our instinct is to evaluate things based on their immediate cost and defer as many things as we can. Somehow our imaginations are very good at convincing ourselves we will be in a better position to do something later on. Most likely, you will not. In fact, you are most likely going to leave it until it absolutely must be done at an inopportune time. Let us call this the Untying Your Shoes fallacy.

How many times do you walk in the door of your home, kick off your shoes, and go about doing something else? It feels great to be home, we know this. But getting home is usually not as time-sensitive as leaving home for an appointment or work. Those are times when not having to untie your shoes before putting them on would be great. Coming home is leisurely. And yet, my tendency is to kick off my shoes and leave the untying to some future time when I’m hustling three tiny people with no sense of chairos or kronos out the door. Inopportune.

I think that this calculus is true for nearly every situation. Costs deferred now are paid for with interest later. Examples:

The last step of sharpening a tool ought to be wiping it down with oil. This drives water from the stones out and protects it from rusting. It is so much easier to take five seconds to wipe down a tool than it is to clean rust off later. And yet, it is very tempting to skip that last step to get back to work.

The same goes for when to sharpen. I have a bad habit of using a tool long after its edge is gone, which results in bad work that is hard to do. A sharp tool does good work easily, but you have to take three minutes to sharpen it. It will take longer to do a planing task badly with a dull iron than it will take to sharpen the iron and do the task well.

I have played the guitar long enough to be quite a good sight-reader. I can play most pieces at a reasonable level the first or second time through. This feels like incredibly fast progress, but it’s hiding a secret. When I’m sight-reading I am not absorbing the information of the piece in enough detail to continue making progress on it. It will sound about the same on the tenth play as it did on the first. Learning is not occuring. This is great if you need two hours of easy music for a gig, but concert prep is another matter.

The fastest way for me to learn a piece at concert-level is to work in tiny chunks, absolutely mastering each one at a glacially slow tempo, combining the chunks into sections and then bringing them up to tempo. When I practice like this, learning is rapid and assured even though the process seems slow. Unless you understand how our brains learn new motor programs you wouldn’t think practicing this way would work. As my undergrad teacher said all the time, “the slower you practice, the faster you progress.” The slow start is a fast finish, but a fast start never gets you there.

So this year, clean the kitchen before you go to bed, take out the trash before the bag is bursting, sweep the shop when you finish for the day not when you start tomorrow, clear out that inbox before heading home, change the oil on time. Untie your shoes when you take them off. You will pay these costs eventually, might as well pay them now.

This is the right way, and it is the easiest way. Maybe not the easiest way it could be done at this moment, but ultimately, it is the easiest way.