I. After reading David Sudnow’s books on learning the play the piano (Ways of the Hand and Talk’s Body) I’ve been thinking about the “handfulness” (his term) of playing and learning music. In practicing improvisation he had to learn to go from playing “wayfully,” that is, through pre-determined and drilled pathways like scales and arpeggios to playing “songfully.” Songful musicians hear the sounds they want (often best accomplished by singing, there is a reason jazz musicians scat) and then develops the instincts, habits, and collections of skills to realize them in sound. Eventually, this songfulness also becomes a handfulness. Your hands learn to find the patterns that fit the song.

This is the open-circuit side of music. A controlled environment where vernacular phrases and gestures are traversed in new combinations, what we call improvisation. The mental space and physical preparation of improvisation is a lot like learning to play basketball or some other team sport. Clearly stated rules and expectations govern the ways of movement that are appropriate to the game and, when well-executed, come off with grace and style. No two basketball games are exactly alike, but any given play is quite similar to something that has happened before. The best players have trained for the most possible contingencies and how to handle them. (e.g. Steph Curry’s warm-up routine.)

Open-circuit skill experts develop vasts networks of motor programs (how the brain runs physical movements) along with task specific sub-routines. These are the subtle differences of movement that allow a five year old to walk and run on nearly every possible terrain, but a toddler can only manage flat and level ground. The five year old has developed many more task specific sub-routines in the “walking” motor program. If you only ever practice scales bottom to top starting on the first note, you shouldn’t expect to be able to jump in to the middle when the band changes chords.

II. “A song is a social organizational device par exellence, a format that quite elegantly coordinates the movements of two or more individuals” (Talk’s Body, p. 105). The same could be said for the rules of any sport or game. They create the expectations that allow coordinated movement and enforce punishment (fouls, penalty flags, time out for big tough hockey players) for those that violate them. On the macro level they create such things as Symphony Orchestras and the Olympic Games, perhaps the largest peaceful international cooperative event.

We don’t have the same formal punishments in music, but expectations are enforced socially. You won’t be asked back to the jam if you’re a showboat or can’t hang with the beat. If you try to play a jazzy solo in a rock-based jam band you’ll be a misfit. Blues has some of the strictest stylistic constraints of them all. In the fusion era we live in there is a lot less stylistic gatekeeping, but bluesmen of a previous generation were fiercely protective of the traditional sounds of blues.

III. On the other side of the spectrum are closed-circuit skills. This is all classical music, but also a lot of virtuosic metal (most of which is not improvised but worked out in advance) and a lot of fingerstyle guitar and folk music. Most genres more flexibility than classical music, but “the song” is essentially set down in writing or oral tradition and recreated roughly the same way each performance. The ability to recreate an ideal version of the music after extensive rehearsal is the territory of classical musicians, figure skaters, and gymnasts over all others. (Many years ago I realized that almost all the popular American sports are open-circuit team competitions—baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer—but that most of our favorite Olympic sports are soloistic, closed-circuit sports like gymnastics, diving, even skiing and oddities like bobsled to some extent.)

The ways of training for these different kinds of performance are quite different. Perhaps they are the difference between preparing to play Hamlet and preparing for an oral argument before the Supreme Court. To do Hamlet (closed-circuit) justice you have to memorize all the lines of course, but you also have to internalize all the thoughts and feelings he is processing throughout the play. Then you have to say them in the way you think will communicate the best. This is nearly identical to preparing to play a classical piece effectively, you are just dealing with the world of sound and gesture rather than word and action.

When you go before SCOTUS as oral advocate, you don’t know what you will be asked. Or at least you don’t know exactly **what you will be asked, but if you belong there you what the possibilities are and you have prepared accordingly. A successful advocate can actively navigate all aspects of a case and argument depending on the questions asked. The best even adjust their manner and attitude according to the tone of questions from the justices. These are the equivalent of task specific sub-routines. After the very brief prepared speech (”playing the head” as jazz people say), it is all improv. If you pull up to the jazz jam you don’t know what tunes will be called, but if you can’t play Cherokee, Stella by Starlight, All of Me, and twenty or thirty of the other most commonly played tunes then you really aren’t prepared.

IV. A curious habit of mind music students develop is to think about their hands as technology. Over years of practice the hands develop ways of moving and manipulating your instrument that seem to take on an alien quality. Around age sixteen I saw a video of myself playing the guitar and had something like an out of body experience. It was clearly me and my hands doing this playing, but I couldn’t imagine it was possible I actually did it. It seemed that some force was impelling my hands around the guitar in a way I didn’t fully understand.

And indeed, I did not fully understand it. I had been practicing essentially mindlessly, repeating the same things over and over again for rote muscle memory. In this way I learned to play some very difficult music, but performance was always on a knife edge. One misstep on this very narrow path I had gone down thousands of times and it would fall apart. Good preparation accounts for this by playing a piece in as many different ways as can be devised to account for the irregularities of live performance and playing with nerves.

This kind of practicing is from the hands up. Input is primarily from the hands, and the executive function does something like a pass/fail evaluation. “That attempt sounded bad.” “That attempt sounded good.” And then some are better or worse.

Practicing in this mode is wildly inefficient. The solution to the bad attempts is always another attempt. Wishful thinking, of course, that the hands will magically find the right pathway after traversing the wrong pathway dozens of times in a row. As I try to drill into my students, after you have played a mistake the most likely thing you will play the next time is… a mistake. This is something like the plateau of ability Sudnow hit after he had developed his “chops” on scales and arpeggios, but still couldn’t pull off stylistic improvisation. He had to lead the hands rather than follow them.

Learning the practice from the brain down is a major step for developing musicians. Careful analytical thought is the first step to progress, but it is primarily analysis of the hands and their ways of moving in relation to the music. Wisdom on an instrument comes from knowing what kinds of movements will be secure in the stressful environment of live performance and which won’t. ”Fingering is destiny” is another of our studio mottos. This kind of mental work creates an integrated connection from brain to hands that holds up to pressure much better. Rather than throwing your hands at the task hoping they bring it off because they have in practice, you are actively in control and making constant adjustments based on feedback. The brain tells the hands what to do, but the hands also respond with whether what is asked feels good. This is where the “songful” and “handful” nature of playing well come together. The mind and body in harmony.

V. Another element of handfulness in music—which you might remember is where this rumination began—is in the composing of music itself. My current concert program is all works by guitarists or lutenists. This is an interesting context to observe hand-based thinking. It’s clear that each of these pieces has a firm rootedness in the topography of the instrument. Though they aren’t easy by any means, the music doesn’t demand from the instrument something it isn’t good at. The best player-composers have independent musical ideas of course. A sure sign of hack-work is music that follows common patterns or relies completely on instrument-specific effects. But even the best pieces are molded by a deep knowledge of terrain, texture, and the possibilities of four fingers playing six strings. This music “fits the hand” as we say, and allows the instrument to speak in its natural voice. It’s an absolute joy to play.

“The only way to change the past is with the quality of attention you give to the present.”

• David Whyte A year ago, in March 2025, after a fairly steady increase in time staring at my phone each day, I decided it was time to do something about it. The exact tipping point has escaped my memory. Most likely it was a combination of things that finally impelled me to make changes I knew I wanted. What I wanted to do was obvious. I wanted to spend several hours per day fewer looking at my phone. Those hours I wanted to turn into paying better attention to my children, being more focused at work, reading books and periodicals, and generally being more present. Maybe thinking a stray thought now and then. The why (I was spending too much time on my phone) and the how (to stop) were not as clear. I consider myself a reasonably mature and disciplined person. How was I accidentally spending several hours per day more than I said I wanted to starting at this stupid thing? An honest answer to this question had to be made. There is some amount of difference between the person we like to think we are as and the person we actually are. The size of this gap varies person to person. You probably know someone with a very large gap and others with a smaller or gap. I did not think of myself as someone who looks at his phone for 4-5 hours a day. But I was, because I did. You are your habits. I eventually figured out why. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was looking at the phone to cope. At that time, having not-quite-two-year-old twins was challenging (in a very normal sense, many people have much more challenging lives, but it was difficult nonetheless). It was simply much easier to look at the phone than to deal with two needy and often crying children. Or at least to disappear for a few minutes of pleasure after dealing with them. I would say coming to terms with this and facing it as a personal deficiency was the most important factor in this project. More accurate self-knowledge being attained, I had a fifteen year habit to kick (first smart phone: 2013, iPod touch: 2010). If will power alone was going to work, it would have already done so. I was fairly sure a change in habits would require a change in equipment. I was ready to look for a dumb phone. If you’ve explored this you know that it gets overwhelming quickly. Lite phone, wise phone, the brick. All kinds of startups (and more all the time), most of them delivering what appear to be very unimpressive tech at purity-test pricing. I didn’t see myself spending ~$500 on a phone the purpose of which was to do fewer things and that only does those things when it’s in a good mood. I wanted the sturdy utilitarianism of my first flip phones with a few of the most useful tools of the smartphone. I needed a list. (That is the second Frog & Toad allusion for those keeping track.) I came up with what seemed like a modest list:
• Navigation
  • I briefly considered a dedicated GPS, but Garmins are also expensive and appear to have made absolutely no UI progress since I last used one circa 2010. Oh, and most of their new features also require connection to a smartphone. I also navigate on foot and by bike occasionally. It needed to stay on the phone.
• Podcast app/music streaming
  • I listen to podcasts and music daily. I usually listen to CDs in my car, but there are lots of times I want to have access to streaming media away from my car or computer.
• Bluetooth
  • To connect to devices which play the podcasts and music.
• Calls, texts, and group texts (you know, a phone)
  • If you have always been on iPhone you need to emotionally prepare for the violent reaction your iPhone friends will have when your texts now come through in green bubbles instead of proper blue bubbles. This is real. I was willing to compromise on just about everything else, but these few things painted me into a surprisingly small corner. The number of phones offering actual navigation and streaming media without a large screen and everything else in the world is quite small. This was all a bit of a non-starter, until I found Jose’s Dumbphone Finder. This tool allows you to select your nonnegotiable features then shows what phones are available. This brought me to what was quite literally the only option that met my criteria, the Tiq M5 Mini. I ordered one for $190 on eBay, which arrived broken. When its replacement came I switched my SIM card over and used this phone exclusively for the next 6 months (except for a ten day period when I was leading a study abroad trip in Europe and needed more firepower; for that I just swapped my SIM back to my old iPhone).  The M5 Mini is indeed a full-featured smartphone running Android, which I actually prefer to the well-dressed bully that is iOS. And along with the physical buttons it has a touch screen and supports voice-to-text, which is really the only way to do anything on this phone. The thing is though, that screen. It’s tiny. It has terrible colors and a slow refresh rate. It really doesn’t draw you in. It was exactly what I was looking for.  It is a very mediocre piece of hardware. Slow, laggy, takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, don’t even think about multi-tasking. Unappealing and just barely able to get the job done, but priced accordingly. This is what you want to reset your brain. The friction wears down those pleasure receptors quickly. The first few weeks I would impulsively reach for this silly little phone only to think “what am I going to do with that?” This was exactly what I was hoping to fix - the habitual reach. It was also a great conversation starter. Millennials were nostalgic; other dads at the park would rush over to ask me about it. Gen Zs were curious and slightly horrified. The physical buttons were a wonder to them. I showed some of my students how I could text with T9 and broke their brains. I felt like Jed Clampett. I used this little guy for about six months. Then I dropped it in the toilet. It dried out and seems to still work, but while it was in the rice I switched back to the iPhone. And guess what? I’m ok. In fact, now that my itchy trigger finger was reformed, the iPhone helped me be on the phone even less since it was good at doing the few things I wanted it to do. No black and white screen, no parental controls, just fixing my own broken default attention. Here is my five step guide to spending less time on your phone: 

1. Face yourself. 1. Say out loud or write down in your most private journal that you are a person who spends X amount of time on your phone every day. If you do not like the number you hear/read, proceed to step 2.
2. Disrupt your habits with a low-reward, high friction digital environment
   1. Lots of ways to do this. A change in tech worked well for me. When the fingerprint sensor on my wife’s phone broke she found she was opening it less because it’s just slightly harder to press those buttons.
3. Maintain this environment as long as necessary.
   1. If you still reach for the phone without a distinct purpose you aren’t ready yet.
   2. You might start to examine those moments and wonder why you are reaching at this particular time. This is a sign of growth.
4. Test the waters of the normal environment.
   1. Mutatis mutandis, you can have the convenience of a smart phone without getting sucked into the void every day.
   2. Or don’t. When my iPhone dies I expect I’ll go back to the M5. I actually enjoyed it. If nothing else, it’s something to feel smug about.
5. Transform the quality of the past with your attention to the present.
   1. Fill your environment with beautiful things and people to love.
   2. Deeply paying attention is one of the greatest forms of pleasure.

This is a program note I wrote for a few concerts I’m playing this month.

The way I see it, the most exciting thing about being a classical musician is participating in a tradition. Guitarists have five hundred years of lute and guitar repertoire to explore, enjoy, and perform. Maintaining this tradition has two responsibilities: preservation and progress. If we don’t compellingly present the worthy music of the past it will be lost. If we don’t promote new (sometimes uncomfortable) music, then our living tradition becomes a museum that will slowly but surely die. This program is an attempt to do both of those things and show some strains of continuity across five centuries of making music plucking strings.

The guitar is considered one of the most difficult instruments to compose for. Intricate polyphony is possible, but many simple chords are unplayable. Because of this, much music for the guitar (and lute before it) was written by performers who also composed. The first three composers on this program played the lute. Francesco, Dowland, and Weiss were each among the most famous musicians of their day, but with the passing of the lute as a major instrument their music fell into obscurity. In this sense Weiss, like his contemporary J. S. Bach, was as obsolete as he was famous by the end of his life.

The rest of the works are paired by genre but written at least two hundred years apart. Though of different eras and styles, the starting points of grief, nature, movement, and a formal process show through as these musicians living in different times and places picked up their instruments or sat down at their desks to compose.

To these works, and in this venerable tradition, I add two of my own. The title Lost Loss comes from a book I was reading when writing this. It describes the feeling of missing something but not knowing what that thing is (in this case, a secure sense of tonic for most of the piece). Fierce Friend (dearest friend) is related in material but uses a more dissonant harmonic language incorporating microtones. In an arch form (ABCBA) with coda, the central slow section is an exploration of the clash between twelve-tone equal temperament, just intonation, and the frets of the guitar. (This just means it sounds out of tune on purpose). The coda is a reimagining of the familiar chorale melody that inspired the title.

If you’re curious, you can hear the premier performance of my pieces here.

I have read the essay going around about habitats of attention and multimodal information consumption. It’s compelling, and I laud the sanguine approach. I am also wary of challenging anything a librarian says - I have learned they are so often right - but I think it has two major problems: one around incentive structures and one around media ecology.

Iacono hints at why our digital environments are the way they are, but doesn’t quite come out with it: greed. The companies that have designed our most addictive apps have reaped the rewards. Massive IPOs, rising stock prices, a seemingly infinite market cap. When you can harvest the time of humanity at scale you can get wildly wealthy. They do this while knowingly creating products that are harmful and they do not care.

Who then is going to make these proposed interfaces designed for deep thought? The fact is, they already exist, but not at scale. There are any number of small companies providing low-distraction phones, quiet RSS readers, or research and information tools. There are in fact still companies that sell physical books. These are utterly different kinds of companies though, because they are selling a product.

Slow, deep thought is not a scalable business model because there isn’t a wide demand for it. The market (by which I mean, people’s) demand is for diversion, as L. M. Sacasas gets at in this essay from a few years ago. The moment the steam-powered printing press lowered the cost of producing books, there was demand for penny dreadfuls. The moment we could deliver endless streams of whatever that stuff on tiktok is, there was an attentional market (billions of souls strong) demanding it for hours a day. As much as I would like to think that this is a design problem, my humanist instincts are telling me that we have a human-problem at the heart of all this.

My other issue is around issues raised by McLuhan and Postman: the medium [has an inexorable push toward certain modalities of attention to maximize profit, which given the above description of the financial incentives of screen-based attention means engagement maximization] is the message. Now that some of our biggest and most famous companies don’t sell products, how else are they supposed to operate? Surely we can’t expect them to fix themselves. It also seems highly unlikely that any government could or would seek to impose some kind of design regime. Nor would, I think, we want them to.

The most compelling idea from the essay is the construction of “attention habitats.” This is absolutely true, attention is a designed and cultivated good. It won’t just happen. Distraction is always available. But just like no one is going to clean your room or do your dishes, it seems unlikely to me that there will be a large scale effort to correct our attentional issues. Building and defending your own habitat is required. We need individuals who desire that for it to happen.

This is a program note I wrote for a few concerts I’m playing this month.

The way I see it, the most exciting thing about being a classical musician is participating in a tradition. Guitarists have five hundred years of lute and guitar repertoire to explore, enjoy, and perform. Maintaining this tradition has two responsibilities: preservation and progress. If we don’t compellingly present the worthy music of the past it will be lost. If we don’t promote new (sometimes uncomfortable) music, then our living tradition becomes a museum that will slowly but surely die. This program is an attempt to do both of those things and show some strains of continuity across five centuries of making music plucking strings.

The guitar is considered one of the most difficult instruments to compose for. Intricate polyphony is possible, but many simple chords are unplayable. Because of this, much music for the guitar (and lute before it) was written by performers who also composed. The first three composers on this program played the lute. Francesco, Dowland, and Weiss were each among the most famous musicians of their day, but with the passing of the lute as a major instrument their music fell into obscurity. In this sense Weiss, like his contemporary J. S. Bach, was as obsolete as he was famous by the end of his life.

The rest of the works are paired by genre but written at least two hundred years apart. Though of different eras and styles, the starting points of grief, nature, movement, and a formal process show through as these musicians living in different times and places picked up their instruments or sat down at their desks to compose.

To these works, and in this venerable tradition, I add two of my own. The title Lost Loss comes from a book I was reading when writing this. It describes the feeling of missing something but not knowing what that thing is (in this case, a secure sense of tonic for most of the piece). Fierce Friend (dearest friend) is related in material but uses a more dissonant harmonic language incorporating microtones. In an arch form (ABCBA) with coda, the central slow section is an exploration of the clash between twelve-tone equal temperament, just intonation, and the frets of the guitar. (That is far more technical than a program note should ever be, I apologize). The coda is a reimagining of the familiar chorale melody that inspired the title.

If you’re curious, you can hear the premier performance of my pieces here.

When you come down from the mountaintop Breathless and effervescent with the rare air Of enlightenment, clarity, the extraordinary,

Forgive me if I seem unmoved. I’ve been down here all along Vacuuming crumbs from under the children’s chairs.

A recent post by @dwalbert about the proliferation of the phone-based vertical video format (and a vertical ways of noticing) got me thinking about musical mediation. One of my perennial preoccupations, as it turns out. This post suffers from a case of Too Long, but I’ve trimmed it as much as I can.

We have two primary ways of experiencing music: playing it and hearing it live. These are both embodied and direct. Player and listener are quite literally interface. We also have two mediated ways of encountering music: notation and recording. As formats of mediation, these are quite different and have very different results from one another.

The last time I taught my music technology class I asked this essay question on a quiz:

“Which technology do you think has had a greater impact on the development of music: notation or recording?”

I expected a variety of answers but was surprised at the veracity with which most students (10 out of 12) argued for notation. These were all young musicians undergoing classical music training so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did get me thinking about the different ways we relate to music through technology.

As a tool of preservation and communication notation is of enormous value. Without it, nearly every piece of music before about 1900 would be lost. At least we assume this. Without notation would the western tradition have continued as an oral tradition rather than a written one? Would violin teachers pass Bach partitas down to their students like sitar masters pass down ragas? Would they have subtly changed over the years the way folk songs do? Would there be Bach Partitas at all or would music have sounded utterly different in his day? I don’t know, but I am fascinated by these kinds of question. I would 100% read a book of speculative musicology (which should exist) imagining a European music tradition without notation.

For everyone who ever lived before c. 1900 (and many others since) the only music they ever experienced was played within ear shot. Thinking this way it’s easy to realize why Pa’s fiddle is so present in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood memories and why music and religious ritual are so closely intertwined throughout the world.

Notation is not just a means of idea capture, it is also provides a model for compositional thought. Mozart had the inner ear to write complete pieces in his head before writing them down, perfect and complete, while Beethoven worked out his musical ideas on paper as he revised draft upon draft. The key here though is they were both translating sound to notation in their heads, Mozart at his desk and Beethoven walking around the countryside. (His typical day involved two hours of vigorous walking.) The notation was to communicate intent to the musicians, but also provided the frame of creative possibility. I’m fond of this definition of notation from Ferrucio Busoni, “Notation…is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later” (from Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music).

Another of my speculative questions is whether Mozart would have been such a prodigy in a different era. The classical style, with its homophonic texture and clear rhythms, is the style most well-suited to Western staff notation. It makes complete sense on the page, which is why it’s the music we give beginning music theory students to practice analysis. Mozart possessed a potent combination of aural imagination, creativity, and facility, but he was also born at the perfect time. Compared to later styles, which visibly strain against the limitations of staff notation (and eventually sought to break free of it altogether), Mozart’s music on the page is like a boat in the water drafting beautifully.

Stravinsky was the first composer I know of that bragged about composing at the piano. The complex sonorities of his music had to be worked out audibly since they didn’t follow an established vernacular. Historically though, composers hear the music then they write it down. Bach considered anyone who composed at the keyboard an amateur. Professionals do their thinking by ear.

This is why it seems obvious to me recording is a more impactful technology and has changed us as musicians much than notation. Notation is potential sound, recording is actual sound.

Think for a moment about the diversity of music you have heard in your life. Now think about the music you have heard live. One of my favorite composers is Arvo Pärt. I cannot recall ever hearing one of his works in a live concert (though I have played one!). Even the concert I attended at the actual Arvo Pärt Center in Estonia didn’t have a piece by Arvo Pärt. And yes, this felt just like going to church and not praying. There are dozens of composers whose works I know and admire for whom that is true. Recording has allowed us to become musical globalists in a way that notation could never have done. Compared to notation, recording is a populist technology giving access to an entire world of music. No skills required, just the equipment to play it.

Richard Taruskin points out in the introduction to his six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, that what we generally call “music history” is really the history of notated music plus a few bits of archeological evidence. At least until the 20th century. Now all other musical activities can be recorded, preserved, and studied. The earliest ethnomusicologists developed arcane notation systems to capture the idiosyncrasies of folk musicians’ individual performance. A generation later they could just record them.

This is the place where the “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” quote usually falls, but I’m not going to. Recording has enriched my life more than almost anything else. (And I bet Wendell has a hi-fi somewhere on that farm). If I had to choose it or notation I wouldn’t have to think two seconds. I am extremely good at reading music, but I can learn the music I want to play by ear if I have to. I cannot hear the music of the world except through recordings.

I will point out some ill effects though, perhaps analog to David’s original point about ways of seeing. Recording has had profound effects on our expectations of music. Most notably in our standard of perfectionism. I see this in my students frequently. If your main exposure to music is through studio-edited recordings that simulate perfect performance then you can have a falsely elevated standard for how good a live performance needs to be. Just like we think there are actually people who look like the instagram-famous with their clever poses, cosmetic surgery, and camera filters, we think musicians actually sound like this in real-life. They don’t. Striving for this standard leads the most dedicated students to practice to the point of injury and psychological torment over their mistakes.

Nearly every music student has had the experience of performing a recital that goes well and is well-received. Everyone (genuinely) says how nice it was, and you feel great. Then you get your recording back and eagerly listen only to hear mistake after mistake. Mistakes that nobody noticed in the live performance and didn’t detract from its effectiveness in the least sound like a pimple on your nose in a photo. Unnoticed in real life, absolutely glaring on record.

However much you might love recordings, we all know that the experience of person-to-person music-making is the real item. At least for those of us who still listen to live music. It seems some of us are so used to hearing pristine, auto-tuned, doctored vocals that hearing a real singer can be a letdown. Like the virtual porn-addled college student who has lost his desire for real people, we can lose sight of the beauty of unmediated musical experience. However much I may admire Glenn Gould, his animosity toward audiences and performing should be seen as an early harbinger of this pathology. In Adam Neely’s sharp video on AI generated music he includes results from his informal survey of Suno users. One of his questions is which AI generated music they consider influential on their own music. The responses were primarily bafflement. Why would I listen to someone else’s AI generated music? I listen to my own!

Music-making, ideally an instrumental activity extending and enriching our humanity, can become another device. Removed from the need for cultivation, discovery, experience, and sharing, one of the most humanizing of all activities, playing and listening to music, enters the goon cave.

A few vignettes, then the point:

When I was an impressionable young musician, I attended a masterclass with Angel Romero (one of the famous Romero family of guitarists). He was drilling a very short passage with a technically accomplished guitarist who was getting bored trying to pull off a phrasing idea. The student finally complained, “It’s just five notes…”

Maestro Romero promptly threw him out of the masterclass and left to get a coffee.

In my grad school days when writing papers was a significant part of my life, I used to work on papers for weeks before writing them. This involved a lot of reading, score study, note taking, and thinking about stuff on the bus or while walking around Baltimore. Usually the night before it was due I would sit down and write the thing start to finish, then edit early the next morning before turning it in. (This process caused my wife great distress. Much like Donald Draper napping on the office couch, it was impossible to tell if I was working or not most of this time).

The majority of the work was figuring out what I wanted to say. How to say it was the final stage. Saying it with some level of style took up the smallest amount of time.

In an interview, microtonal pop musician Maddie Ashman says, “When you have to program every note of a song individually you really think about if it is the exact right note at the right time or if it should be left out.”

This is a great observation made necessary by a stupid music culture. Imagine a composer from the 18th century commenting on how labor intensive it is to choose all those notes. The writer who must find all those words for each sentence. The painter mixing colors. The horror! (Maddie’s music is actually very interesting, though likely not everyone’s taste).

My kids were recently watching this animated version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. While the animation is lovely, what struck me was the incredible quality of the music. Someone wrote and orchestrated a beautiful piece and then a whole orchestra of live humans (who got paid) with a conductor (who got paid even more) sat down to record it in a studio. For a six minute cartoon. When this was the only way to do it, it was normal.

Edited to add another:

I’ve been wrangling versions of this post for weeks and couldn’t get it to work. It was up to over 1000 words of the kinds of thing you read everywhere about AI. It had a tortured aside about Sturgeon’s Law. It was terrible.

After giving it another go this morning, it all clarified in a single moment. The stories were the post. They say everything I was trying to say on their own. It took a lot of friction to get there.

This is my post about AI. Let the reader understand.

Following up from yesterday’s post about interpretation: I taught on the subject in a recent class. I gave a few examples, one musical and one dramatic, to demonstrate what we (the interpreter) bring to the texts we present in performance.

The first was maybe obvious, but makes the point exceedingly well. Glenn Gould playing Variation I from the Goldberg Variations (1955 recording) and Glenn Gould playing Variation I from the Goldberg Variations (1981 recording).

1955:

1981:

One student didn’t even pick up that these were the same pieces (she admitted she was distracted by what she thought was a typo on the slides when I put the same performer and piece information up twice). Other students chuckled or nodded knowingly as I started the second recording. Such wildly different readings by the same person. We discussed what the elder Gould was attempting to show about the music that young Gould was not, and vice versa. As we listened a bit more, it seemed that students started to come around to the 1981 when they initially thought it was a bit goofy. (Gratifying, I’m a pretty devout 1981 recording fan).

The point is: they are wildly different and everything that sounds differently is a matter of interpretation.

My second example is a bit different. I used Speechify to create a reading of To be, or not to be. I used the “British English - dramatic” voice. Here’s how it sounds:

I’ll be honest, it’s better than I expected it to be. (And significantly better than it was in the first version of this lecture I prepared two years ago). It observes punctuation, leaves space, and has a pretty convincing cadence. It is, in other words, correct. Though it pains me to say, it’s as good or better than many actors I’ve heard on the stage. But it isn’t interpretive.

We then listened to the Andrew Scott version:

Let’s just say, the hush in the room made it clear the point was thoroughly made.

A year or two ago I read an old scholarly book that (while certainly past its prime) gave me some interesting things to think about in relation to music. As a teacher of ear training, I’m fascinated the effect musical literacy (both learning music from scores, and the culture surrounding notated music) has on our conception of music, how we listen to it, how we learn it, and how we remember it.

Walter Ong’s Orality and LIteracy: The Technology of the Word, is a classic text that summarizes the developments orality studies made in the 20th century (published in 1982, most of his sources were written from 1960 on after significant field research occurred in the first half of the century). Ong cites studies on Yugoslavian epic poets who very purposefully avoided learning to read because they instinctively knew that it would diminish their memory and ability to perform their poems.

According to Ong though, large-scale epic poetry is decidedly not memorized verbatim. The oral poet is employing a very different process than the English school boy compelled to recite Lord Byron line by line (if they still do this, it’s been a while since Goodbye, Mr. Chips I suppose). The oral poets internalize the shape of the story, and employ a vast library of tropes and set pieces to convey it, in effect making the story in each telling. The set pieces are in the correct meter, and they have collections of phrases that will complete a line when needed to maintain the metrical feel. They have a functional library of poetic devices and phrases that are extemporized in new combinations for each telling.

When asked, the poets themselves say that they tell the stories “the same way” each time, though comparing recordings of different events shows there are often significant differences. The concept of a “verbatim” retelling is foreign to a mind that does not interact with texts in their rigid fixity. They do indeed use the same lines to tell the same story, which is what they mean when they insist that each performance is the same, but the particular order and combination of lines varies from performance to performance. Oral recitation is a social interaction between audience and speaker. The environment and give-and-take shape how the story is told in each instance.

That is to say, the poets are playing jazz.

A tune from The Real Book has a general melody, chord progression, and structure (although the classically trained students in my improvisation class found it very difficult to grasp a lot of standard melodies since the performers ornament them so much). Each realization of it, however, is unique because solos are improvised, and comping is a subtle art of reacting to the soloist. In my (very limited) experience of playing standards, the better I know the song, the more differently I will play it each time. If I know the changes well enough to inhabit them there is greater freedom of exploration and creativity rather than just trying to remember what comes next. Add an audience to the mix, and there is a matrix of influences that combine to create that one moment of musical time, never to be repeated. But of course it was just Autumn Leaves. Saying we played Autumn Leaves though is such a different thing than saying I performed the D Minor Partita by Bach. This is why “music” is such a difficult thing to talk about, it comes in so many forms and practices.

This experience of spontaneous creativity is the most compelling aspect of improvisation. Christopher Berg (my wonderful undergrad teacher) spoke of classical performance as a “rehearsed improvisation.” He loved the experience of being on stage and being able to incorporate fresh ideas into the performance. A good concert hall filled with an attentive audience is an inspiring thing. The ability to respond to that can breathe life into a performance. And it should! The connection with the audience is the point of the whole thing.

Improvisation has been systematically eliminated from the education of classical musicians. Until somewhat recently every musician was also a composer and improviser. It was just part of their training. Philip Glass describes one of Nadia Boulanger’s part-writing exercises in Words Without Music. Three students would participate. M. Boulanger would play a melody. The first student would sing a bass line that followed all part-writing rules against the melody (from memory and by ear, mind you). The second would sing a tenor line that accompanied both soprano and bass. The third would have to remember each line and supply an alto line that would not conflict with any of the extemporized parts. This is striking (and a story worth telling in a memoir) because it is so unusual in 20th century theory pedagogy.

Concerto cadenzas originated as a fermata left by the composer to indicate that is where the soloist would improvise (or compose) their own cadenza. Now in those concertos without composer-supplied cadenzas there are “traditional” cadenzas written by someone else and codified into the score, given a shelf in what Nicholas Cook calls the “musical museum”.

The cult of genius is at least partly to blame here. Since Beethoven and the Romantic era there has been an elevation of the few “geniuses” whose muse could break through everyday composition and give us these special musical revelations that deserve being enshrined in the canon forever. (Despite the fact that there is significant unevenness of quality in that canon). Why would I piddle around with improvising (much less composing) when I could be learning Beethoven instead?

The performer in this framework is essentially a messenger, delivering, intact, the vision of someone else. To borrow from Nicholas Cook again, classical musicians don’t give us their own music, it is a “performance of” the piece. Did you hear Barenboim’s performance of the Beethoven Sonatas? Barenboim has nothing to say, except as an authoritative channel for Beethoven’s genius.

For orchestral players (highly trained, sensitive artists in their own right) the situation is even worse. Not only are they serfs to the Great Composers, they must deliver them according to the desires of the conductor who, if he is established enough (and it is generally he), is heralded a sub-genius who has seen through the fog to the true inspiration within the music handed down from the first-level genius whose golden pen delivered these notes to us.

This is why so much of our classical musical training is spent ensuring accurate execution of the written score. Now, I appreciate a nice clean performance as much as the next person (probably a lot more actually), but if that is all you do it really stunts your creativity. The closely controlled structures of classical music provide a wonderful framework for creativity. When you know your way through a piece the interpretive decisions made in a compelling performance can be bracing. To do this though, you must get past the realm of notes and into the world of sound. This is what I want my students to do, see through the score to a world of imaginative hearing and listening where we can find “what the sound wants to do,” to quote my other great teacher (Julian Gray).

If there is a genius to works in the canon (skeptical though I am of the concept, I am fairly dedicated to much of the canonical repertoire), it is in how they can be interpreted and delivered in a meaningful way. This role of interpretation must be held up as the highest form of musical achievement for classical musicians, much like the great masters of jazz are the improvisers.