If you are someone, like me, who reads books about music, I have a very important piece of advice.

In musician and composer biographies, memoirs, retrospectives, etc., many authors, perhaps jealous of the kinds of affects music is capable of, spend many pages describing music. Lengthy descriptions, colorful language, the most adjectival adjectives. I can think of several culprits, but the worst is Jan Swafford. Of the 848 pages of his Mozart: The Reign of Love (a magnificent biography by every other measure) I would estimate 200 pages are dedicated to descriptions of operas. So many pages that he runs out of words to describe them; at least three opera plots are described as possessing “various contretemps”. (I haven’t read his Charles Ives biography but I can only imagine how his thesaurus felt after that one was finished.)

Here’s the advice: when an author begins describing a piece of music, stop reading. Go listen to the music. Skip the description and carry on. You will be much the better for it.

I’ve taught a lot of guitar lessons over the years. I stopped counting at 10,000, and that was quite a while ago. This means I’ve taught hundreds of students. When it was my main source of income (basically all of my 20s) I was not in a financial position to be picky about who I taught, so I saw all kinds. After a while you notice a pattern, a typology that recapitulates every few students. Here are some of the folks that come through your studio:

The six-year old with type-A parents

You are a substitute for piano lessons. Piano lessons, of course, are a vehicle for pressure-testing the hopes and dreams of the parents. Well-heeled families approach their children’s education with the intensity of Wall Street floor traders. Any day could be ruinous for future prosperity.

The mother almost always brings the student to lessons. (The father, one imagines, is too busy closing deals that use esoteric financial instruments to raise your rent thirty percent in exchange for providing munitions to jihadists.) You can spot her from across the parking lot, deeply tanned with fresh highlights glimmering as she descends an SUV the size of your first apartment. A few of these students do very well. The rest are crushed by great expectations. Maybe a lacrosse scholarship is in their future.

The wannabe rocker

Catchphrase: “It can’t be taught, you have to feel it.” A curious opinion for someone forking out $75/hour to be taught whatever it is. This person has probably played more air guitar than you played actual guitar. The scourge of record-store owners since their teenage years, they have complete scorn for all things technique. “You think Stevie Ray Vaughan practiced scales?! He was just rocking for hours a day.” Suggesting that if hours a day were being spent on the guitar in this circumstance we could expect some real progress leads to a change of subject. The least painful way of spending this half hour is usually chatting about favorite records.

Some wannabe rockers actually play the guitar, but not well enough to make a career at it. They often become music store teachers with the catchphrase, “It can’t be taught, you have to feel it.

The child of the wannabe rocker

A variation of the wannabe rocker is the dad (always a dad) who understands his opportunity has passed. This of course means the frustrated dream must be laid upon the child, like a student loan that transfers to your family when you die. “Did you guys rock today?! 🤘” he always asks at pickup.

When I’m asked this question I understand how Europeans feel when Americans ask “What’s up?” I take the same tack and do not answer. In most cases the answer is, “your offspring cannot play a single chord after six months, but you always pay your bill on time and I need the money so I’m going to smile and give a polite chuckle before giving another reminder of the necessity of daily practice time.”

The wildly optimistic adult

Many students come to the guitar for the first time as adults. These tend to show up in January, but sometimes following significant milestones. A birthday ending in a -0, for example, or perhaps retirement or even divorce. Something has lit the fire that it is time to learn this thing they have always wanted to do. Retirees have the advantage of time on their hands. Though their brains are not as elastic, they can actually spend time on it and do well. It’s the high-achieving, mid-career, president of the HOA, marathon running, community volunteer, father of five who really overestimates how well this will go. “With all those responsibilities how much do you expect you’ll be able practice?” I always ask. “Oh, an hour a day or so, maybe more on the weekends.” “The weekends when you run 10 miles, coach all of your kids’ soccer teams, and deliver food to shut-ins before teaching Sunday school?”

They’ve been good at everything they have ever done, so when the guitar doesn’t take they usually turn to something else quickly. Perhaps starting another nonprofit or digging a well in the third world. Something manageable.

The wildly pessimistic adult

This person, despite having a career and devoted family, insists they have never been good at anything and will probably not be good at this either. “Really struggled this week.” “Not getting anywhere on this thing.” “I’m sorry to make you listen to this.”

The funny thing is, these students often make very good progress, but they never believe that.

The theorist

A typical adult male specimen. The student who cannot play worth beans, but has many theories about the guitar and playing it effectively. Theories that are, of course, untested, since he cannot play. But he was reading an interesting post in a forum last week about the geometry of wrist angles and attack velocity. He usually has significant opinions about the construction of guitars and various tone woods. Don’t get him started on rounded versus straight nail profiles. The luthier-built guitar he has sounds great…in theory. But since, alas, all that wrist geometry is purely theoretical we might never know. Perhaps when he has finished trying every guitar string currently in manufacture it will sound better. For 9-12 months, he will challenge all of the advice you offer, will not practice, and will eventually move on to try his theories on another teacher.

The Switfies / Smithies

There is a pretty consistent breakdown among the teenage girls who take guitar lessons. 30% are alt, angsty teens who listen to The Smiths and would like to play The Smiths. Black nail polish, thrifted Dark Side of the Moon t-shirts, Doc Martens. They don’t fit in at school and you are always slightly worried about them. The other 70% are buoyant Taylor Swift fans, whose piety has led them to take up the guitar itself as an act of devotion. After learning a few songs, the bright ones notice that they all used the same four chords. For those not truly devoted to the genius of Taylor Swift, the bubble will burst. Knowing that all of her songs use the same chord progressions, the same structure, and are basically all the same will disabuse them of the illusion that she is a brilliant musician. For the truly devout though, it will only confirm everything. “Only a true genius could make so many amazing songs out of the same four chords!”

The human heart is a wonder.

Every fall I visit the 3rd grade class of a friend who teaches elementary music. I play some guitar music and talk about it, but mostly I answer their questions. They ask the most amazing questions.

A sampling from my last few visits:

“Why is the guitar shaped like that?”

“Why does the guitar have six strings? Could it have more?”

“Are there guitars that are really big or really small?”

“Why does it sound that way?”

“Who invented the guitar?”

“Who invented music?”

“Why do different instruments sound different ways?”

“What’s your favorite thing about the guitar?”

“How long does it take to get really good at the guitar?”

“How do you make it sound like two instruments at the same time?”

Not yet burdened with the imaginary shame of not knowing things, they ask these with utter sincerity because they want to know the answer. We would do well to follow their example.

In my lifetime there have been two public figures who made their public lives about kindness and uniting people: Fred Rogers and Dolly Parton. Both gone now, with no viable candidates to replace them.

Mr. Rogers made his life about service, kindness, and attention. When he hosted guests on his show (generally chosen because of their marginal status) the thing that is most impressive is the intensity of attention he bestows on everyone. The kind of attention many people can go their whole lives without receiving. Attention like this is so rare. Those who receive it from him seem to glow. They become the best version of themselves as he watches.

When he received a lifetime achievement award and had the chance to give a speech to the best and brightest of show business, he did two things with the opportunity. First was the gentlest reminder that being in entertainment, just like ministry, which he was ordained into as well, should be a life of service. The calling is to improve the lives of others. The second thing he did was remind everyone they had helpers (”look for the helpers,” as he taught us on his show). He asks them to take a moment of quiet to think about the people who helped them succeed. “I’ll keep the time.” In seconds, the camera pans across eyes filled with tears across the room. At an event where the most famous people in the world gather to congratulate themselves on their success, a mild-mannered puppeteer found a way to utterly reorient the values in the room in just a few moments. You could imagine a similar scene if Jesus showed up in the War Room.

Though her life was certainly more glamorous than Mr. Rogers’s, Dolly Parton demonstrated the same ability to pay attention to those around here. There are so many stories of her kindness to studio crews, cameramen, and particularly musicians. She always had time to speak with everyone and see them where they were. Like Mr. Rogers, she always remembered her helpers. When Porter Wagner fell on hard times later in life, Dolly purchased the rights to his back catalogue and gave them to him as a gift. He had taken advantage of her in a vulnerable moment in her early career, but she chose to remember that he had gotten her started in show business and taught her to succeed.

Her secretive philanthropic work has slowly gotten out over the years. It’s notable for the local focus. She helped nearly anyone, but in particular she helped the people where she was from. She is probably the most locally rooted of any celebrity, always keeping a connection where she grew up and investing heavily in the area. Paying attention to its needs and challenges was part of this. So many people in her position insulate themselves from real life and the people around them, but she was always of the people.

And whatever else she might have done, she never forgot that songs are what bring people together. In a clip I saw this week, she was asked about the song in a time capsule at Dollywood to be opened in 2045. She said why she had done it (”It’s a very good song!”) and how there were included instructions for how to play a CD in case everyone had forgotten by then. “How do you think people will react when they hear the song in 2045?” the host asks. “Well, I hope you like my song.”

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.