The ever-incisive Hollis Robbins* (personal story about Hollis in the footnote)—one of the great critics of higher ed in the AI age—has a recent piece about what she calls the Wordcels versus Shape Rotators debate. These terms were new to me but the debate is recognizable. In Robbins’s telling, there has been debate among literate people since Aristotle about the social standing of those who design and build. It was not settled that citizenship should be granted to the artisanal classes, and this dichotomy has created cultural divisions ever since. I’ve spent enough time around working-class folks (basically everyone I grew up around outside my family) to know that those who work physically have the same reservations about people who diddle with words and numbers for a living. But of course, they tend to voice those doubts in conversations, not writing, so they don’t get recorded in textual history. Only the things they make are left as a testament to their contribution. You know, bridges, skyscrapers, electrical grids, aqueducts, pyramids. Just stuff. It seems to be quite easy for word people (let’s stop calling everything a -cel) to ignore the contributions of stuff people, even while they enjoy the conveniences of the built environment. Every time you flush away your waste and don’t get dysentery you should remember Alexander Cummings. I don’t have the slightest idea who built my house in 1959—and probably couldn’t find out even if I tried—but they did some fine work I live in.

With some exceptions, history tends to focus on those who left behind words. The names of the designers and builders of every ancient wonder are lost to us. The kings who commissioned them are the ones preserved. Tourists though tend to focus on the world of shapes. We don’t travel the world to read documents, we go to see the things left behind.

(An aside I’ll try not get distracted by is that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both adept in each of these worlds. Powerful writers and rhetoricians who were inventors and systems thinkers as well. Early America, cast largely in their mold, was both highly literate and physically industrious. The respectability of the working class citizen was something European visitors frequently commented on. It seems you need both of these things for a functioning democracy.)

You are probably thinking, like I was, of how you fit into this. I’m a professor, a reader, and hobbyist writer. My professional life is largely a verbal affair. But I’m a musician, I love to make things with my hands, and I can in fact move shapes around in my mind. I discovered this installing drywall with my dad when I was a kid. He was marking a piece to cut and I realized it was going to be backwards when flipped around to the wall. His knowing look told me I had done something impressive. (He could also do this of course, he had just made a mistake. He’s among the most highly-trained of shape rotators, a head and neck surgeon.) Geometry and trigonometry were the only math subjects I comprehended.

For many of these activities it’s obvious to me which category they go into. Reading and writing: words. Woodworking and home projects: shapes. But what about music?

Is music a word or a shape?

Of course it’s really another thing altogether. Music is sound, that most undervalued of sensory information. Other than getting a song in your head, most of us don’t think in non-linguistic sound very often. Thought is generally done in the medium of language or space. Constructing sentences, or imagining objects. Thinking in sound in a structured way is the province of musicians. Moving from sound we hear to a structured system is where this topic applies.

Classical musicians love to make music intelligible. Most of what we teach as music theory is just naming common patterns so they can be discussed and recognized. We do this with common sounds (chords and scales), rhythmic organization (meters), and patterns of change and repetition across pieces (forms). We love to know what something is. This knowledge often does very little to explain the aesthetic experience of the music itself, but at least we have some labels.

Music notation goes a step further to turn music into a symbolic system like writing. From a wash of sound rises a set of signifiers that are named and described. This is no less shocking a development than turning spoken language into writing, crossing a profound threshold from temporally organized sound to frozen representation.

Symbols are helpful, but the experience of music is really spatiality rooted. We describe the high and lowness of sounds or the “speed” of tempo. We experience music in its own space that is not physical space, but resembles it in its mechanics of movement, weight, and repose. Music lets you dance while sitting still. This explains why a set of labels for musical phenomena are not required, or even particularly important, to have a meaningful experience. The spatial and temporal elements are unavoidable, even if they are imprecise in our perception. (My thoughts on this are greatly informed by the discussion of linguistic metaphors for language in Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music.)

Other than high and low however, we have a dearth of terminology to describe musical shapes and patterns. Outside of technical labels, we are left with very few terms for melodic shape and texture, much less things like timbre. Check the glossary of a theory textbook and you might not find a single term that describes the shape of a melody, even though these things do fall into some pretty standard patterns. Even the concept of a shape is fraught, since we can only assemble these “shapes” reflectively in the imagination. They do not appear before us in a single moment like a sculpture or painting.

Perhaps the language of dance would be a more useful set of metaphors. Gesture describes music much better. A way of moving through time in sound space, rather than physical space. Now we’re compelled to add a third category. Words, shapes, and gestures. Any medium that extends through time must have a way of describing it that includes forms of movement observed sequentially.

If building the coliseum doesn’t earn your citizenship, making gestures will do it even less so. We have only descriptive accounts of every dancer and musician until the roughly simultaneous invention of video and sound recording. Every artistic gesture made in the vast majority of human history lost to all.

II.

The words versus shapes debate has also given me a whole new way to understand one of the main things I teach: ear training. Ear training, aural skills, musicianship, or whatever you want to call it is the ability to hear music and turn it into symbolic notation. I play a melody, you write it down in notes and rhythms. This is the bane of most freshman music majors (it was mine as well, life is full of strange twists and turn). Students who are already play their instruments beautifully struggle mightily to translate simple melodies into notation.

This skill lies exactly on the threshold of musical shape and notational symbol. Words and shapes tend to be happy apart from one another. If you have ever read the legal description of a property (it’s on one of the hundreds of sheets of paper before you at a home purchase closing) you understand this. The map, with its lovely shapes, is the proper tool for defining a plot. Words appear helplessly archaic. My six year old’s proficiency following wordless LEGO instructions are a perfect illustration of this.

From the time of literacy we become proficient in translating the soundness of speech into the symbols of writing. For some of us writing becomes the main way we think about language. But learning to do this with music as a young adult makes you feel like a toddler again. Proficient music readers are able to fluently move between the symbol of notation and the world of musical sounds seamlessly. This is what’s going on with sight reading, an incredibly demanding cognitive task. Great sight-readers translate notation to sounds in real musical time, figuring out notes, fingerings, rhythms, and even expression, in real time. Most people can read text at something close to this level, but very few reach this level of musical reading.

I just might incorporate this into my opening class this year.

*When I was in grad school Hollis was still on faculty at Johns Hopkins and ran the humanities program at Peabody. Everyone was a little bit afraid of her because you knew if she was around there was someone much smarter than you in the room. Though very kind, she is a truth-teller by disposition. Anyway, I submitted a paper to her at one point and she called my analysis “very interesting,” a compliment I rode on for months at the time.

“Dude, check out this riff.”

“There’s this super old band called Pink Floyd. Have you heard of them?”

“It was so embarrassing. In music appreciation I thought it was Chopin, but it was Schubert! I was so embarrassed.”

“Dude dude, check out this riff.”

“The guitar is like, how I chill, you know. It’s like my life.”

Strumming chords and singing country songs every time there is a two-second break in anything

“Is that Metallica?” “No! It’s Tool” “Oh, dude, I should have known that.”

Endless noodling while I’m trying to give instructions.

“There’s this band from way back in the 90’s called Rage Against the Machine, have you heard of them?”

“I like music, but I just can’t do music appreciation class.”

To two of the college-aged counselors “So…do you guys have wives?”

Describing the band Polyphia “They’re like what Metallica would sound like if they didn’t avoid complexity.”

After rehearsal “I have a voicemail on my phone. This is my first one, what do I do?!”

“Dude, dude, dude, check out this riff.”

I had a ton of fun with my students this week. If you’re worried about the kids spend time with the ones who are making music, or art, or films, or who have hobbies in general. I did not once ask a student to put their phone down this week, even through some long hours of rehearsal and practicing. I’m convinced that one of the reasons people spend a lot of time on their phones is that their lives are boring. The phones make them more boring, then the cycle has begun. We don’t even need rules about phones at music camp because music camp is a blast.

More from Lawrence Kramer’s The Hum of the World:

Music is sound framed as a source of pleasure (p. 50).

I keep a bit of a collection of definitions of music. Usually one or the other is used as a catalyst for class discussion in my theory classes, but I’m also just always interested in definitions. This is quite a good one.

First of all, it explains why people encountering music they really do not like (often at the tail-end of a music “appreciation” course when they throw in Schoenberg and all the rest into a well poisoned by the teacher) their reaction is so often “That’s not music!”

I’ve never understood that reaction because, well, obviously, this sound being made by an orchestra or whatever and recorded is most definitely music. You not liking how it sounds doesn’t change that. I’m happy to argue the point about intentionally provoking pieces like 4’ 33”, but if you don’t think Fünf Sätze is music I don’t have the time of day.

But! If the implicit framing we bring to music is that it is pleasurable, then when we experience the lack of pleasure, or even discomfort, that unstated expectation has been violated and we throw the whole thing out. “That’s not music” is an expression of an unstated expectation.

Music does not have to bring you pleasure for it to be music, though Kramer’s definition still holds up since it supposes a framing, not an actual result. If music is sound that gives you pleasure then what is and isn’t music would change person to person based on their tastes. My world of music would be larger than my mother’s, at least by a Philip Glass or so. It’s fair to say, generally, that music is definitely assumed to be for enjoyment. It is definitely not for communication or meaning like speech and writing and it is not for dramatic portrayal like film and drama. The murkier “expression” is usually present, but only from the performers point of view. When we put on a recording we are thinking primarily of ourselves, not whatever the performer is/was feeling.

But when you do spin a record or stream a song you definitely do so for enjoyment. There are many forms of this enjoyment, but the pursuit of that enjoyment through sound is what the project of listening to music is for. Point for Kramer, and this will be a useful point for a future class discussion. You are dismissed.

At the end of every school year I send my students this letter. I thought I would share it hear as well. It’s the closest thing I have to a personal manifesto for how I try to go about my life in music.

My dear students,

As you pack up and travel home for the summer I have one final word for you. It concerns the economy.

When I say economy you start thinking about money and budgets and inflation (and this year, tariffs!). That is the money economy. It’s important and affects us all, and music fits into it in a certain way. For those of us that make (or plan to make) a living in music this is very important. You need to know how much money a gig should pay, how may gigs a month will pay the rent, what to charge for a private lesson, and how much self-employment tax you’ll pay on that lesson and those gigs. All of these are important.

But there is another economy that is vital to understand if you are going to make a fulfilling life in music, or really anything else. The economy of gifts.

We rarely think about it, but we live constantly in an economy of giving and receiving gifts. Most of these come in the form of small services we do for one another without expectation of payment. This includes listening, helping, loaning a pencil or sheet of staff paper, sharing a snack, and many of the other ways we interact with one another. Occasionally we exchange physical goods casually and sometimes as formal gifts wrapped up in paper, but the principle is the same: people are more valuable than money.

Whatever the form of a gift, it has a profound advantage over exchanges in the money economy. Nearly everything you buy instantly becomes less valuable. A $100 pair of shoes might be worth $60 after being worn once. Wear them ten times and they’re worth $30 of $40. In the money economy this is called depreciation.

The moment something is given as a gift, however, its value increases. You probably have something you brought to school for your dorm room that is worth very little money, but it’s invaluable to you because someone gave it to you. I have a small pocketknife my grandfather gave me before he died. I could get another one on ebay for $15, but I wouldn’t sell mine for $15,000. This is the power of a gift: it multiplies value with no limit.

And finally, back to music. Though it touches the money economy, I would propose to you that the way to find joy in music is to spend it in the gift economy. This doesn’t mean you don’t take payment for playing, please do. But whether it’s a gig that pays $100 or $1000, the moment you are on stage ready to play the first note, none of that matters. What matters is the giving of the gift we have received and the multiplication of its value by sharing with all who will receive.

There is music that only you can make and you must be willing to give it to us for the world to be as full and rich and beautiful as it is meant to be. This is the power of music. You can give it away without losing anything.

I hope you have a wonderful summer.

1. Paradise Metal (via @jabel) - What I’m calling Byzantine dark-wave, made by a Greek Orthodox priest on his fretless electric guitar. A perfect addition to my diet of microtonal/non-western tuned music.

2. Litanies, Alec Goldfarb - Trained in both jazz and Hindustani classical music, his newest album is realizations of traditional ragas on electric guitar. Incredibly effective.

3. Bach Artillerie (HT Robin Sloan) - I expected this to be a novelty (re-upped Wendy Carlos or Ruth White), but by the end I was listening much more closely. These are interpretive readings and the drumming (from Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier) is amazing. Canon at the 7th is particularly effective. The thing about Bach is the music is just so portable. The structure is resilient enough to endure any treatment without breaking down.

4. String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace,” Ben Johnston (Via my music theory colleague Chris) - Johnston is a pretty obscure composer, mostly of music in just intonation (not to be confused with Tom Johnson, composer of the Chord Catalog). This is a mostly traditional piece, but as the top Youtube comment says, “It’s nice to hear an arrangement that doesn’t sound like it was written as background music for a civil war documentary.” Mensural canon on NEW BRITAIN is exactly what I’m interested in from a string quartet. Kronos sounding fantastic here as well.

When I was about fourteen my mom put a cd in my Easter basket. This wasn’t uncommon, but this particular disk would become one of the more important ones in my collection. I’ve listened to it nearly every Holy Week since.

Other than already being a fan of both Chanticleer and Tavener, I had absolutely no context for this work. I just knew that I loved how it sounded. Chanticleer is somehow the best and most versatile choir around, and this caught them at what I consider their peak (when I saw them in concert around 2010 only one member of choir—the incredible and affable bass Eric Alatorre—that recorded this was still in the group. He spent about thirty years with them but has since retired from Chanticleer and sings with whatever choirs he wants.)

As it turns out, this work is an Orthodox liturgical work. I am not Orthodox myself, but it would be fair to say my aesthetic sensibilities fit a lot better in an Orthodox context than Protestantism.

Tavener was himself a convert to Orthodoxy for most of his adult life and this work was intended as service music for Pascha. He includes somewhat detailed program notes about the movements through the space in the program notes. It appears to have only been performed a few times, mostly by Chanticleer and once by (of all things) a Presbyterian church’s choir.

The choral numbers are predictably Tavener; rich harmony, homophonous textures. Unlike many Tavener works, most of the choral numbers are lightly accompanied by strings which adds to the depth of sound for such a small choir. It’s the solo singing that really stands out though. To a man, they all inhabit the expressive world of byzantine chant (quarter tones and all) in a way that is very unlike any kind of western singing, but completely convincing.

The final movement, Resurrection in Hades, features one of the great shocks in music. After over an hour of sparsely accompanied music, we hear what sounds like a board being hit with a hammer. And indeed, it is a semantron. This is such a foreign sound to eastern protestant or catholic ears, but it carries rich significance in the Russian Orthodox tradition as a traditional accompaniment to processions and funerals.

This is the only work I know with what I consider a satisfying musical depiction of the resurrection. I’ll just leave it at that.

My musical life has been on a pretty serious microtonal kick lately. As someone who has always been somewhat dissonance-seeking in music this is probably the logical outcome. Microtonality is one of the things I’ve always found appealing about Chinese, Indian, and Arabic music. It’s a world of flavors we don’t have in classical music. And I’ve been at the buffet.

The science of tuning is fascinating, but when I try to talk to students about it they start to regard me with some suspicion as a possible crackpot. Many sidelong glances are exchanged around the room when I tell them the piano is a profoundly out of tune instrument and has ruined our ears for pure intervals. But it’s true! There are so many interesting and expressive sounds we have learned to hear as out of tune because they don’t accord with our reductionistic approach to tuning for convenience. (Don’t ask me how I feel about auto-tune.)

What kicked all this off was the sensation out of Canada, Angine de Poitrine. I’m not into the goofy costumes and performance art aspects of any of this but the music is so interesting. My introduction came (along with about 2 million other people) from Rick Beato on YouTube. If there’s anyone right now that can make a difference in the growth of a group, it’s Rick with his commentary and high standard of taste.

Hearing this kind of smart, prog/math rock is so refreshing. The nearest analog I can think of is my favorite Baltimore band, Horse Lords. The combination of complex rhythms and quarter tones is just enough to make this stick, but the loop-pedal nature of playing as a duo means the material is limited so you can get used to it. The YouTube comments on their videos are hilarious, but the consensus of those that like it is that it is something like a rebellion against the aesthetic averager that is AI-generated music.

Everyone else in my household absolutely hates this. The children shriek in horror. You might too.

Doing some more reading about tuning theory led me to this absolute gem from one of my favorite composers, Terry Riley’s The Harp of New Albion. I’ve read about La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano pretty extensively, but somehow missed the existence of Riley’s counterpart, a full length exploration of five-limit just intonation (as usual, Ethan Hein has you covered if you want to go deep on how this works).

These sonorities are so rich and expressive, much more alive than a piano in equal-temperament. As Riley once put it, “Western music is so fast because it’s out of tune.”

And of course the best information I can find about this with some tuning analysis is from a good old-fashioned blogspot blog.

All this reminded me of an album I got deep into a year or so ago. Alec Goldfarb’s microtonal take on the blues. His bio says that Hindustani classical music is one of his major influences. The synthesis of blues guitar and sitar playing is really quite something. This is not easy-listening in any sense, but hearing the tropes and habits of two wildly different styles merged is compelling. This music was clearly made by very serious-minded musicians that approach this project with earnestness.

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.

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.

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.