Isaac Greene

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My Grandfather’s Hands

Posted by Isaac Greene on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think of this as I drive down Laurens Road. Stopped at a red light, the largest great blue heron I have ever seen flies by.

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Music & Literacy

Posted by Isaac Greene on

I’ve been reading an old scholarly book that (while certainly passed its prime) is giving me some interesting things to think about in relation to music. I’m fascinated at the moment by 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 research of 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 at scale. The oral poet is employing a very different process than the English school boy compelled to recite Lord Byron line by line. 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. That is to say, they have a functional library of poetic devices and phrases that are extemporized in each new 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 or 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 given melody, chord progression, and structure. 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 an 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. 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 were 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 (that is to say added to what Nicholas Cook calls the “musical museum”).

I think 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” tradition. 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 individual musical training is spent ensuring accuracy of execution of the written score. Now, I appreciate a nice clean performance as much as the next person, but if that is all you do it really stunts your creativity. The thing is, 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.

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Ready-Made Corporate Grief

Posted by Isaac Greene on

I have two memories I’ve been comparing in my head lately. One is recent; one from more than a decade ago.

When my grandmother was in hospice care, slowly laboring toward death, our family gathered around her as families do and have done for all of history. With only palliative care nurses stopping by we had hours of uninterrupted time. Someone thought to bring a stack of hymnals, and much of that time was spent singing hymns together. I was asked to bring my guitar to play for her, but mostly we sang unaccompanied. This was in 2009.

Just recently, a family member (a first cousin) died tragically and unexpectedly. At his funeral Amazing Grace and It is Well were on the program to sing corporately. In a crowd of over 200 (mostly christians but of mixed denominations) I expected those songs to be known by nearly everyone. Noticing the singing was weak I looked around. It appeared at least half of the attendees did not know those songs, at least not well enough to feel comfortable singing them.

A little later we had a song played over the loudspeakers. It was a classic example of a modern worship song. Simple structure, sparkling high-ends, reverb, a very catchy hook. There were highly individualized reactions of emotion and worship as the cleanly produced music washed over us. In the moment, it was more pungent than the congregational songs by far.

It seems that in that moment of community grieving, we didn’t have the ability to comfort one another. We needed another body, a corporation, to make it for us. Our grief was commodified because our community traditions have been eroded away to almost nothing.

It made me wonder, how much longer will any group of christians be able to gather and sing a song they all share in common? Is that day already passed? If Amazing Grace is now not a shared experience of American christians in the heart of the bible belt, what is?

I have no aesthetic, moral, or worship war argument to make regarding new church music (not here at least, catch me later). The fact is I like much of it, have benefitted from it, and have led it. But I am fairly convinced we aren’t considering one of the most important roles music should fill for the church: community.

In a recent interview Andy Crouch mentions how he “has lived through the collapse of congregational singing in America.” At the same time, we are living through the “modern-hymn” renaissance. And it’s true, there are many songs of significant substance and quality being written. I suspect there are as may (or more) songs of a high quality being written now than ever before. I love many of them. I’m thankful for them, and I’ve learned things from them.

Modern hymns won’t solve the real problem facing church music though. Many new songs may be vapid, but the quality of songs isn’t the point. The problem is that keeping a strict diet of new songs impoverishes the church community of an in-common canon of songs known by heart and available for use during times of community need. This disconnect is particularly strong across generations.

Does the church in America today have a death-bed hymnal? The church band and worship leader will deliver ever-hyped, slickly produced, micro-doses of “worship” on a weekly basis. You can find the same songs in a similar style on Spotify to bring into your life, but good luck singing it in your family devotions.

We have substituted the deep rootedness and comfort of singing together around the death bed for individual adrenaline shots of pre-made emotion. There is potency to this music in the moment in all its highly technical production, but it requires that production for its affect. It doesn’t translate to smaller, casual settings. Out in the wild, where you live and work and suffer as a family and community (that is, your life) the best you will likely get is a tinny version played through the 1/2 inch speaker on your phone.

This flows directly from the musical style, song choices, and technical productions of the church.

For those who choose songs for worship we must ask ourselves, when it comes time for the elderly of our church to die will the young people in their lives know the songs that will be a comfort to them? Will they be reduced to playing tracks on their phone? Have we all just agreed that it’s acceptable to cut off entire generations from one another? The community cost of such a decision is so high, but most of the time it is invisible. We decide against the tradition because we don’t have to pay the cost in the moment.

The note comes due at the most important events in our community: our weddings and funerals. These are the moments when a diverse group (generally from different churches) gathers for corporate celebration or grief. And here we find out just how eroded and fractured our community traditions have become.

When I come to die, don’t give me ready-made corporate grief. Give me Jesus and some hymns.

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On Using a Tuner and Tuning

Posted by Isaac Greene on

It is time to get something off my chest. I am a tuning iconoclast. A Snark non-conformist. A planet waves denier.

I noticed something about my students quite a long time ago. The ones with tuners clipped to their guitars very rarely sounded more in tune than students that didn’t. Often, a student would go through each string, staring at the tiny screen all the way, then begin playing sounding terribly out of tune. They would generally not stop to retune.

“Does the tuner say you are in tune?” I would ask. As often as not, they hadn’t actually tuned in a way that the tuner even said was in tune. Why not? They couldn’t hear the difference. Why couldn’t they hear it? They weren’t listening, and they weren’t listening because they had a tuner. When you put a tuner on your instrument you outsource the most important thing about you as a musician: your ear.

Other than tuning one string to standard pitch, I would submit you should never* use a tuner (see exceptions in footnote 1). I have two reasons for this:

  1. You will never develop your ear if you always use a tuner.
  2. Tuners do a bad job of making your guitar sound in tune.

Reason one is self-evident. You do not develop things you don’t use. I would like to know the history of how tuners became accepted for professional-level classical guitarists. They are the only musicians I have ever seen use a digital tuner on stage. For many of them there is one permanently affixed to their instrument somewhere, like a bionic extension of their musicality. I expect this is because nearly every other instrumentalist plays in an orchestra or band and tunes as a group regularly. (Then there are pianists, but let that go.)

I have sat in guitar quartets made entirely of graduate students that could not get four guitars in tune with each other, even with tuners. This can only be a lack of developing the ear.

The second point is more complex. Our electronic tuners use a specific frequency (Herz) associated with each chromatic pitch using A440Hz as the starting point (some of the better ones allow you to adjust your A reference in case you are part of the concert pitch wars or play an absurdity like the arch-lute). But how do the programmers decide which frequency each pitch should be? 12TET – Twelve-tone Equal Temperament.

An explanation of historic tuning systems is beyond me, and a wonderful rundown has already been made in this excellent post by Ethan Hein. For guitar specific applications, see this post on why it is impossible to tune your guitar.

If you use a digital tuner you accept as dogma that 12TET is the best way to tune the six strings of your guitar to result in the best sound. I submit that it is not. (In fact 12TET is a perfect example of how the modern mind likes to work. Simplify something until it seems irreducible and ignore all the unfortunate outcomes and issues underlying it until most people (even most musicians) are completely oblivious to the very existence of underlying issues and unfortunate outcomes. Any solution is self-evident if you ignore enough evidence).

How then should a guitar be tuned? The short answer is “so it sounds good.” Here is the process that gives me a result I have learned to live with.

Warning: significant guitar/acoustics jargon in the following.

I get my low E from a pitch pipe app on my phone. I tune the 5th string by matching its 7th fret harmonic (3rd partial) to the 5th string harmonic on the 6th string. Now, people will tell you this is not a good way to tune because 3rd partials are sharp compared to 5ths in 12TET (indeed, the very thoughtful Stephen Aron says exactly this. I also appreciate his thoughts on the Digital Tuner.) This is true by about two cents. By my ear, two cents is well within an acceptable margin of error.

This is also a wonderful example of begging the question. It assumes we want equal-tempered 5ths. I do not. I want the most glorious acoustically perfect fifths possible. If I wanted 12TET fifths I would play the piano. But back to the tuning of guitars…

To make sure things are where I want them, I compare the open low E to the 2nd fret B on the 5th string. This fifth is quite low in pitch, but you can still hear when it is nice and pure.

I tune the 4th string just like the 5th. 5th fret harmonic on A compared to 7th fret harmonic on D. I fine tune it by comparing the E on the 2nd fret of the 4th string to the low E. We should now have a relatively pure fifth and octave for our bass strings. This is where things get fussy.

Leaving the third string for last, I now tune the second string open to the 6th string 7th harmonic. I listen for the purest unison possible with no beats. I play it against the open E string as well (octave+fifth) and the B on the fifth string (octave) to fine tune. When I do this the 2nd string reads quite sharp on a tuner, about 7 cents. But it sounds good!

I tune the 1st string like the 2nd, but in relation to the 5th string. I can now compare it to the open 6th E and the open 5th A, and the E on the 4th string for a double octave, octave+fifth, and octave. When I get it where all of those notes sound as in tune as I can get them my 1st string usually reads about 10 cents sharp. This is quite a bit!

When I realized that’s how I was tuning (the treble strings just always sounded flat when “correct” with a tuner) I thought I was losing it or had really messed up my ear somehow. Then, I bought a piano and started researching how to tune it. That’s when I learned about stretched tuning. Piano tuners have always been compensating for some of the difficulties of real-world tuning by stretching the octaves slightly as they go up the keyboard. There it is! I’m not crazy. It’s a short article, but here is the pertinent quote:

“If the interval is a double octave [like the 6th string to 1st string on guitar], exactly matching the upper note to the fourth harmonic of the lower [which would be the 5th fret harmonic on the 6th string] complicates the tuning of that upper note with the one an octave below it.

Solving such dilemmas is at the heart of precise tuning by ear, and all solutions involve some stretching of the higher notes upward and the lower notes downward from their theoretical frequencies. In shorter pianos the wire stiffness in the bass register is proportionately high and therefore causes greater stretch.”

Guitar strings are about the length of those in small upright pianos (though they are under much less tension). Reading this finally cracked the code for me of why my ear was telling me one thing and the tuner another. I have trusted my ears ever since.

That leaves the 3rd string. I get the best results tuning it to the open A string using the 2nd fret A for an octave. I basically want the 3rd string to be as in tune with the bass string octaves (G, A, and B) as possible and it usually works pretty well in the middle of full chords. It is the string most open to tempering for key. Getting a standard E chord and C chord to both sound passable means you are about where you want to be.

Convoluted as this may sound, it is the best I’ve been able to do to get a rich sound where my treble strings don’t sound flat. I should also just note that being in tune and playing in tune are different things. You will always have to overcome tuning oddities on the guitar, but that is why you develop your ear in the first place. If you can hear the problems you can fix them.

Footnote 1: The one time you should use a tuner is in a pit band or orchestra when you need to stay closely enough tuned silently, or while the rest of the band is tuning. Then by all means, a tuner’s results will be acceptable in this situation since your ear is unavailable.

Footnote 2: Google “James Taylor Tuning” for a plethora of articles on how he tunes his guitar. His solution is accounting for a few more things than mine (including capos), but interestingly his 2nd string is about 7 cents flat compared to the 6th and 1st about 11 cents flat. Further vindication.

Music

Glowing Encounters With the Past

Posted by Isaac Greene on

I am not one to get much from the lyrics of songs. There are songs I have listened to hundreds of times and I don’t have the slightest idea what the lyrics are about or even what they are for the most part, it’s just part of the music. When musical processes are happening language ones aren’t. I am amazed when I meet people who think of songs as a poem with musical accompaniment. I do not understand that.

This is why it’s surprising that some of the words I’ve been thinking about for over a year are from a song. In the narrative song “Tangled up in Blue” Bob Dylan presents this scene after the protagonist heads him with a strange woman:

She took down a book of poems and I began to read
Written by an Italian poet of the 13th century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul
From me to you
Tangled up in blue.

True to form, this is the only part of the extensive lyrics that I know or understand. This stanza stuck in my mind after a few listens and has been with me ever since. They describe so perfectly an experience of encountering the past that has happened to me and still happens on occasion. It’s something I am almost constantly seeking, though I never thought to describe it before Dylan did it for me.

It’s when you are reading an old book, or walking through the 17th century wing of an art museum, and among all the other portraits and lines one arrests you. It speaks directly to you, and you wonder how it came alive. Why does it glow brighter than the rest?

I am a haphazard reader of poetry at best, but I made my way through an entire volume of George Herbert a few years ago. I could read for days without this encounter, then one day, unexpectedly, a poem would grab me by the throat.

Most of my encounters with the past have been through music, but they are of two different kinds. The interpretive work of another musician will show you something you never heard before. What a great gift, to be able to quicken a dead page of notes in the ears of another. But sometimes, when I work hard at it or sometimes at random, it will happen through the musical score.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on being an ear-driven musician. A musical score is a curious thing. In many disciplines the cultural artifact is received as it is. We have a painting, a chair, a sculpture. It inhabits its own space and is its very self. The work surrounding it is curatorial (putting it in a context to be appreciated) and critical, commenting on it in relation to itself, it’s contemporaries, and it’s cultural tradition. Other than restorative work, you don’t do much with the thing itself besides careful observation.

Music (in notation) and drama require realization. The received artifact is a set of instructions, not the thing itself. To be of any interest, this must be done interpretively.

In his musings of the enduring quality of Bach the pianist Jeremy Denk says this about the musical score:

A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed—but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time.

Embedded here is the idea that the fullest enjoyment of music is through individual interpretation. Making the music as it if were written on your soul and writing it on your own soul in the process.

This is why I continue to play old music. It’s also the standard I bring to old music. If it doesn’t burn and I can’t make it pour off the page like it’s my own then perhaps it should stay in the past. It at least doesn’t belong in my repertoire.

Of all the old music this comes easiest with Bach. That’s why his music is such a mainstay for me. Just below the surface it is ready for a renewal. I have been playing the D Minor violin partita (BWV 1004) for almost four years solid now. I cannot imagine getting bored with it. Just today I thought of something new in the minor arpeggio section of the Chaconne. This happens regularly after hundreds of hours of study and practice. This music is like a campfire ember clouded over with ash; the slightest stir and its glow is renewed.

We don’t always know what’s written on our souls. We’re like the ring of power. It has a message but it has faded from view until the fire makes it glow again. It’s not always obvious when a piece of music will come to life either. Some require a lot of work. The spark isn’t easy to find. Sometimes an inspiration I’ve heard in another performer seems flat and lifeless in my hands. But when the combination of text and performance come together, an old Italian from the 13th century might show you something you needed to say and give you the words to say it.

Music/Pedagogy

On Thinking by Ear

Posted by Isaac Greene on

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

Thus spake Vern Falby, one of the teachers I encountered in grad school that had a profound influence on my musical thinking. All of his theory classes were called “Thinking By Ear” followed by whatever the topic of the class actually was. They were very untraditional classes. The text was created by him and mostly consisted of work scores annotated with various “discovery procedures” that he invented to “suss out” (a favorite phrase of his) the inner workings of the piece. After doing many practice scores we would make Shenkerian reduction scores without using the notation. We would listen and sing the middle-ground lines to understand the melodic structure under the surface notes.

(Dr. Falby has spend the last few years creating an online version of this process if you are curious how this goes: http://www.thinkingbyear.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notation vs. Recording

Posted by Isaac Greene on

A recent quiz I gave my music technology students had the following essay question:

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 the majority of students (10 out of 12) argued for notation. These are all young musicians undergoing a classical music education so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did get me thinking about the different ways we relate to music through these two technologies.

Obviously notation as a tool of preservation of the past is of inestimable worth. Much of the music that is so important to me would be lost had it not been written down. 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 Indian masters pass ragas down? 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 this question. If there are any speculative musicologists out there writing about this I haven’t found them.

As a means of compositional thought notation has also been influential. Mozart had the inner ear to write complete pieces in his head before writing them down perfect and complete, but Beethoven worked out his musical ideas on paper as he revised draft upon draft. The key here though is they were both composing in their heads, Mozart at his desk and Beethoven walking around the countryside. The notation was to communicate intent to the musicians. (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.” Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music.) Beethoven, of course, was left only with his inner ear by his later life. Something I still recall now and then and can hardly believe is true.

“Notation…is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later.”

Ferrucio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music

Not until Stravinsky did a composer openly brag about composing at the piano (that I know of, correct me if I’m wrong) since he was dealing with a more complex set of sonorities. Historically though, composers hear the music then they write it down. Bach considered anyone who composed at the keyboard an amateur. That is, professionals do their thinking by ear.

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

For most of human history, all the music a person heard in their entire life was made by themselves, someone within ear shot, or imagined in their heads. For barely more than a century has this has been different. Through recordings we have access to an entire world of music, not just our locality. Recording gave non-notated music portability and preservation for the first time.

As Richard Taruskin points out in the masterful introduction to his six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, what we call “music history” is really the history of notated music plus some scarce archeological evidence of previous musical activities. At least until the 20th century. Now all these other musical activities can be recorded and preserved. 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. There are dozens of composers whose works I know and admire that is true for. Recording has allowed us to become musical globalists in a way that notation could never have done.

I will follow this up with another post about how being notation-centric affects our musical thinking.

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Beauty as Humor

Posted by Isaac Greene on

After some years away, I find myself back in the stream of an old argument: the objectivity of beauty. There is a group that wants to assert that beauty is an objective property of some cultural artifacts. To deny it as such is to deny aspects of the created order. Just as we believe in an objective external reality that we share in, beauty is a property that we find as part of that reality. Denying it as such can only be a sign of the post-modern times.

On the other is the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” crowd. The variety of human experiences is too vast to insist on one expression earning the designation Beautiful. So many factors are at play it must be an inner, subjective experience.

I have my issues with both of these really, but in my actual real-life experience beauty certainly is illusive. Even within myself I can’t agree on what I find beautiful. There are pieces of music I used to adore that I can barely stand anymore, and there are pieces I found bland that now utterly entrance me. The music did not change. It must have been me. And I am one person, imagine the variations of experience across the cultures of the world and through time.

The problem gets worse when those in the first group accuse those in the second group of denying the reality of beauty. When this happens I think what we need is a new metaphor, and I think I have found it. Beauty is like a joke.

“Humor is in the ear of the beholder,” seems almost obvious. We speak of a sense of humor to describe the different tastes individuals have in what they find funny. You and I both find something funny, even if we disagree on the particulars of what that is. One person’s knee-slap is another’s groan.

When someone says, “That’s not funny,” we may very well be aghast or even offended that what gets our goat lets theirs roam free. But, none of us think the other is denying the existence of humor, or telling us we don’t experience the joke as funny. We well understand that what they are saying is “I do not find that funny.” We expect these variations. Even a single person will find some things funny at the right time, but be utterly embarrassed at the wrong.

Humor (like music) is also highly acculturated. Many kinds of humor do not travel across cultures well, with inside jokes, cultural references, linguistic devices (puns really can’t be translated, a great grief), and more.

This is just how humor is. I will not be accused of denying the objective reality of the Funny or of becoming a post-modern grifter because of this.

When it comes to beauty though, tempers might run a bit hotter.

Truth, goodness, beauty. An odd trio, and perhaps (all due respect to Plato and the gang) unevenly yoked. Beauty is the only one that describes an inner experience in response to something. (Debates about objective truth and goodness being far outside the scope of this little project).

Perhaps it’s no accident that the movement that privileged inner experience (the Romantics) and solidified our modern notion of the aesthetic also challenged the nature of truth and goodness on experiential grounds. If beauty is subjective, then why not truth and goodness?

For now, I’ll take “why did the chicken cross the road” and I’m happy to leave you “three peanuts were walking across the Strasse.”

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Enlisting in the Reeks and Wrecks of Web 2.0

Posted by Isaac Greene on

In Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952) we are introduced to a society where manual labor has been fully automated. Managerial work of various kinds remains for the educated and intelligent. A scarce amount of maintenance on the machines that accomplish the actual work supporting society give a few others something to do. For the rest, unless they are crazy enough to expend energy on creating art or poetry, there is no pressing need to work. Most of society can live in their suburban homes with regular deliveries of new goods.

This creates a social problem. The formerly employed workers have nothing to do. The result is not a leisurely utopia, but a culture rife with social pathology. It becomes apparent that large swaths of society need something to keep them busy. How do the mangers keep the formerly employed busy? Reconstruction and Reclamation.

The “Reeks and Wrecks,” as they are known, are armies of former laborers who now set about doing menial tasks. A stop sign has been knocked down by a careless driver? A team of twenty or thirty Reeks and Wrecks will be dispatched to reconstruct it. Some aluminum cans have been littered along the highway? A dozen or so otherwise idle fellows will reclaim them and return them to the factories where the machines they used to operate will turn them into spare parts or raw material for new products.

I am teaching “Intro to Music Technology” this semester. Most of our class will be very practical, learning basic fluency with a number of different applications, but this being Higher Education I though it appropriate to spend a little time thinking about the effects of technology on creative work.

Reflecting on my current relationship with tech has got me downright nostalgic. Like most 30-somethings, my first computer experiences were on a desktop PC in the “computer room,” tinkering with MS Paint or playing solitaire and pinball. My brothers and I would all pile on the swivel chair to shepherd our characters across the Oregon Trail or down the Amazon (which we installed from a disc that came in a cereal box).

We were duly amazed when the desk-occupying CRT monitor and floor-filing computer tower were replaced with this:

All at once we had access – not to the internet, but to creative software. This was in the apogee of the Steve Jobs era when Apple was for the creatives. What is in the middle of the dock that comes preloaded on this iMac? iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand. We suddenly had creative tools that were almost perfectly engineered to be accessible to amateurs while still giving enough capability to create whatever we could think up. It was truly (for us at least) a bicycle for the mind.

The internet came somewhat later when we finally got a broadband internet connection. Around 2003-ish (if memory serves) this was the height of the blogspot era when everyone you knew who was online was probably writing a blog. They were definitely reading them.

We followed the logic of our available technology at the time and used the internet to broadcast our creative work. We all had blogs. We figured out how to post videos online before youtube. Starting with the blogspot templates, some of us learned some crude coding so we could customize our websites in ill-advised ways.

In fact, the blog editor invited this kind of tinkering. The html was right there, you just had to start typing. The designers of this technology left an open invitation: be creative, make it your own. Create your piece of the internet as you see fit.

As I’ve experienced it since these heady days, the internet has been on a steady march toward automation since. Even the first version of facebook I participated in (c. 2008) was insanely (and inanely) chaotic compared to today’s unified experience. Before the Timeline, we had a Profile that could be customized in many ways (though even this paled in the customization possible [and expected!] of a MySpace page).

I’ve begun to think of these late stages of Web 2.0 we’re in as an automated factory. Everything is automated within the high walls of our online mega corporations, where slaking the data-thirst of The Algorithm is the business model. They don’t need your thoughts on this or that, they only need the next set of pixels that will arrest attention for a few seconds longer and teach the machine what it is you really want to see so it can be delivered in an ever-narrowing form of pure attentional lust.

Distribution is automated. Create the right content and the machines will show it to an audience. It will in fact “go viral,” a label that used to be reserved for a once-a-year or so phenomenon. Virality is a daily occurrence on the newest platforms. It’s the business model.

Manufacturing is (mostly) automated. “Content creation” would seem to be the area where creativity still shines through. With billions of individuals inhabiting these environments, you would think you could come across something unique or even shocking in its creativity. This is the great deceit though. You may create the content, but to be successful (to be seen by an audience, the essential value of social media) you must capture the attention of the means of distribution. Without that you will not be seen, and to not be seen is the great failure of social media. (As Wilde might have it, even worse than being seen in increasingly embarrassing ways. “Cringe” is an entire sub-genre where people have made themselves famous. If capturing attention is the value it’s better to be famously embarrassed than alone with your dignity.) In Alan Jacobs’s phrase, we are constantly directed “towards the frivolous or the malicious.”

Distribution rewards content conformity. The designers want it this way, that’s why they have provided the creative tools right within the app. You don’t have to go to any other photo-editor where you might be tempted toward originality (or worse, leave the compound and spend time on a device offline where they cannot make money on you). Have you tried this new filter that makes you look like a deer? You should try it. It’s fun. Everyone is doing it and it makes you unique.

As Vonnegut shows in Player Piano, with automation comes idleness and with idleness disaffection. What I haven’t understood until recently is that I was a pretty fulfilled factory worker before. I was making stuff. Like the most skilled machinist who used to delight in lathing perfect parts with tight tolerances, until on his last day of work his actions were programmed into the machine and it now continues to make his perfect parts day and night. It need only stop for occasional maintenance, while he has permanently stopped in front of his television.

What to do? Well, I have decided to enlist in the Reeks and Wrecks of Web 2.0. Reconstructing a piece of the internet that was a channel for individual creativity rather than mass-attuned virality. Reclaiming a bit of space where I can create, because if you aren’t creating something you are likely going to be replaced and spend your days watching algorithmic feeds.

The point is decidedly not to build an audience, but rather a project of repairing my own broken attention and wresting it away from the consumption of frivolity. Out here in the internet wilds maybe we can find some small shards of value. Reconstructing a blog and reclaiming what tiny turf I can make by hand in whatever way I want seems like a way forward.

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