Why We Need Political Music

This may be a tad embarrassing, but after thinking doing some additional thinking, I have decided to issue a retraction of my recent post titled "No More Political Music."

(Retracting a post is a first for this blog. For the sake of contrast, I have left the post up, but I have deleted some parts I really didn't like).

That is not to say I will start writing much political music anytime soon, but in order to give a reason for this changed, I had spoken too broadly.  In reality, I do not need any grand philosophical reason, other than that just I feel like focusing on other kinds of music for the time being.  After doing some thinking, I decided the previous post is based on a faulty premise.  If we draw too bright a line between politics and the emotions that go into them, we risk losing perspective and compassion.  Here is an excerpt from the post in question:

So why no more political music?  It is because music is a vehicle for emotion, and politics should not be about emotion.  As a lawyer, I believe victories should be won on argument, not emotion.  If you take a position, be prepared to argue it, otherwise, you have no right to hold it.  It is not enough for something to feel right.  It is better to be able to say why something is right when all the noise and all the emotion is stripped away.

But of course, this is nonsense.  It is impossible to separate politics and emotions. This is because our emotions, and not just our arguments, inform our sense of justice.  It is sometimes too easy to shut down into apathy.  Caring is hard work.  I still believe it is important to ready every side to every story, and give every contrarian his or her fair hearing, but at some point we we run the risk of becoming too neutral.  We cannot stand by as passive observers while the world takes on important problems.  Political issues are real and they affect people's lives, and therefore political discussions must take the human element into account.  Our national conversation is not simply "an intellectual feast" (a phrase used by the late Judge Bork) or just one grand thought experiment.  It is instead an application of our values to the very serious problems that face us.  Because politics itself is a discussion about humanity, then music is fully equipped to handle it.

Admittedly, I have been a little bit discouraged by the political conversation in this country.  Even when "my side" wins, I still fee a nagging sense of frustration with the dialogue.  Just because emotion and politics do intersect, that does not mean it is impossible to have an over-saturation of emotion.  One need look no further than cable news to see a saturation of opinion with no basis in fact, and an abundance of those who make the case for fear instead of justice.  Listeners no longer need to be challenged because they now have the power to seek out whatever media is in line with their pre-formed opinions.  It is no longer considered virtuous to seek out opposing views.

This has spilled over into our government.  Partisanship is at a peak, and the dysfunction of our media is mirrored in our elected representatives.  But look one step further.  Our representatives may fail us, but we have also failed them. We the people have failed to get the government we want because we have failed to listen to each other.  We all need to turn off cable news.  Go read a book, or a newspaper, or the blog of a person you disagree with.  This is the only way our national conversation will become healthy again.  Become informed.  There is a place for logic and reason, however cold and dispassionate it may seem.

However, there is also a place for action.  Against the backdrop of today's noisy media, I do feel overwhelmed. Apathy always starts with a claim of "I don't know" which usually turns into "I cannot know."  The noisy partisans who think they are geniuses may be driving us down, but so are all those who would like to form reasoned opinions, but don't put in the effort.

And today's circumstances require more than the apathy we give them.  Our education system is nowhere close to equal.  We are still killing civilians with drone attacks.  We don't have equality in LGBT rights.  We are nowhere near to solving climate change.  Hopefully the rational arguments for justice can get us where we need to go.  But to say that human emotions play no part is ridiculous because these are human problems.  Everyone deserves the joys many of us take for granted. 

And music is perhaps better than anything at speaking to adversity.  If adversity is political, so be it, but you cannot take emotion and detach if from the search for justice.  Otherwise, we make ourselves heartless.  So I was clearly incorrect when I suggested that music and politics cannot mingle.  Who am I to say that the victims of oppression should not voice to that through their music?  What kind of hypocrisy would I preach if I were to say that expression is great, except when you're expressing thoughts about things that actually matter?


And now I'm done writing about politics (for now).

The Lost Art of Album Art

A couple years ago I was in a used clothing store, and I was happy to find a bin of old vinyl records for $0.50 each. I did not have a record player (and still don't, unfortunately), but I thought my good friend (and co-founder of People of the Future) Andrew would like them, so I picked up a few.  One of the albums in the box was Stand Up by Jethro Tull.  Stand Up was an album I had enjoyed for several years prior, but I only possessed it in digital form.  When I opened up the record I found something I did not expect:

Ok, maybe it's not that cool (it was 1969, after all), but it felt odd that I had liked the album for a while, and had been missing out on part of the experience the entire time. That's not to say that a paper pop-out of the band "standing up" is essential to enjoying the album, but I do enjoy little quirks.

It does raise a larger question about album art in general, and how important it is (or should be) to us as listeners.  Album art, is of course, is a natural and foreseeable product of the record industry.  If you need to put a record in a piece of cardboard, you might as well make it look pretty.  Musicians really went to town with this, and in some cases the artwork is just as iconic as the actual music contained on the record.

King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King comes to mind:

Not only does the album cover get your attention, but most people would agree when they hear the opening riff of "21st Century Schizoid Man" that the cover pretty accurately describes the character of the music.

I personally enjoy album art that relates to the music in some profound way. Consider Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here.  The two themes of the album were 1) the experience of losing someone to mental illness, and 2) the band's criticisms of the music industry.  These two themes intersected in the story of Syd Barrett, and the album's cover powerfully conveys the message of the music:

One can also take a different approach, and choose a cover that deliberately has nothing to do with the music.  This was the process behind Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother where graphic designer Storm Thorgerson was reportedly instructed to take a photograph of whatever he wanted, which ended up being a cow in a pasture:

It is my feeling that album covers featuring pictures of the artists are not as memorable, but of course, there are notable exceptions:

Well, this has certainly been fun reminiscing about the late 60s and early 70s, but now what?  I believe that in 10 to 15 years discs will largely disappear, and so what does that mean for the future of album art?  In the iTunes/Amazon MP3 age albums still have a picture associated with them, but you need to put on your reading glasses to make it out.  One could have the greatest album cover ever, and most people will only see it displayed as a 1 inch by 1 inch display on their ipods.  It's discouraging.

There are, of course, many good reasons to get rid of discs.  For one, they are terribly inefficient.  I consider myself an environmentalist, and to me it makes no sense to create plastic discs and ship them across the world when we could transmit the same information digitally. I do not have any hard numbers on this, but it stands to reason there would be considerable savings by replacing discs altogether, and markets will inevitably want to do things as cheaply as possible.  Radiohead reportedly considered releasing their album In Rainbows in a digital-only format, but ultimately rejected this idea over concerns that not all fans would have access to the material. I personally think this will become less of an issue as internet access for the general population improves, but it is definitely something to think about for the time being. Ironically, Radiohead, as far as modern bands go, tends to be quite focused on album art.  One wonders how they will react to a future that is based upon digital-only releases.

Some have noticed that MP3 files do technically have a lower quality than compact discs.  This is certainly true, but one wonders if the general public really cares that much.  I consider myself to an audio person for the most part, but I admit I cannot tell the difference between a CD audio file and an MP3 encoded at 256 kbps. That is not to say I think the distinction is unimportant.  (I'm sure I'll write about this issue soon). In any case, I think that improvements in bandwidth and increases in hard drive space will mean that in the next few years you will see a shift toward a sale of lossless audio files.

It is worth questioning why there should be such a thing as album art at all.  For most of music history it would seem that musical compositions were not generally tied to a specific piece of visual art created for the purposes of promoting the work. (I could certainly be wrong about this, and it sounds like an interesting topic for research).  Either way, we do not now usually associate classical compositions with a piece of "cover art" per se.  One could make the argument that an album with no cover is actually a restoration to what music should have been all along: an absolute statement divorced from any interpretive device.  Why should music be anything more than simply what you make of it?  Consider the line spoken by Fran Drescher's character in the spoof rock documentary This is Spinal Tap: "You think the cover is the reason an album sells?  What about the White Album?  There was nothing on that cover!"

But now the lid is off the box.  Some past albums are so associated with their cover trying to separate the two would be ridiculous.  (Leave it to xkcd to demonstrate this point).  Going forward, it is a different story. Album art came about because it was necessary.  Can we convince ourselves that it is still necessary even though we no longer have cardboard to decorate?  Even if we do not need album art, I think simply liking it is a good enough reason to keep it.  I'm willing to let the fiction go forward if you are.


And don't forget to eat a peach for peace.  Cheers.

No More Political Music

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I will no longer be making any more political music.

I am not going so far as to say that my previous political music has been repudiated, and I will probably continue to play some of those songs at future shows.  But I no longer think that I should be writing new political music.

As I previously stated, ever since I "released" the very confused album called Nine Questions I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the album's treatment of politics, specifically, the mixture of the spiritual and the political.  Is it really appropriate for spiritual tunes such as "Shifts" and "The Clockmaker" to appear alongside highly charged political tracks such as "Liberty" or "Comments on the Political Situation"? Because I am someone who is very troubled by the mixture of faith and politics in this country, I guess I get pretty mad at myself when I find myself doing the same thing.

So why no more political music?  It is because music is a vehicle for emotion, and politics should not be about emotion.  As a lawyer, I believe victories should be won on argument, not emotion.  If you take a position, be prepared to argue it, otherwise, you have no right to hold it.  It is not enough for something to feel right.  It is better to be able to say why something is right when all the noise and all the emotion is stripped away.

There is, of course, an analytical element to music, and some, such as Arnold Schoenberg, have tried to remove emotion from music altogether (at least this is how I perceive serial music, but please tell me I am wrong).  But to say that music is anything other than pure emotion in sonic form is to miss its beauty.  Because of music's power, transmitting a political message along with it could perhaps be seen as nothing less than problematic, even if that message may happen to be the right one.  The arguments should be able to stand on their own, not be propped up by a crutch, however beautiful that crutch may be.

Political music does have its merits without question.  Many would point to Bob Dylan as an example of political music done the right way.  I agree.  But Bob Dylan is great because he was right back then.  What if an equally skilled and clever songwriter had come along and communicated a pro-segregation, pro-war agenda?   I certainly doubt such a person would have escaped history's dustbin in the long run, but the power of music may have allowed such a person to do significant damage in the short term.  If music can give weight to a positive idea, what is stopping it from giving weight to a negative idea?

And do not forget about Richard Wagner.  For the past 150 years we have been trying unsuccessfully how to reconcile the beautiful music he created with the toxic political messages he placed beneath the surface.  It would be unfair to say that music alone was responsible for the rise of Hitler, but evil will easily disguise itself as beauty whenever it can.  As I wrote earlier, I do believe we as listeners have the right to take the music we enjoy and weed out the political messages we do not like, but that does not mean the process is anything close to easy.

Certainly on some political questions we have decided as a nation that there are clear right answers, and no music, however skillfully constructed will change that.  But what about the countless other issues where the "correct" answer is far from clear?  Many issues in today's dialogue fall in this category.  Is music equipped to weigh in on the nuances, or does it run the risk of over-simplification?  All in all, I have come to distrust political music not because I doubt music's effectiveness to at conveying a message.  Quite the contrary, I find music too powerful to be trusted.

And in many ways I do not trust myself.  If I thought I was right about everything, perhaps I would still be interested in writing political music.  But part of growing up is realizing your own limitations and seeing all sides of an issue.  On some issues I know I am right, but on many more I am worried I may be wrong. Before you can have true conviction, you must know what it is you do not know, and then you must learn where to go from there.  As for me, I fall under the former, but not the latter.  Nine Questions is artistically inadequate because, despite its title, it was more interested in answering questions than asking them, and these supposed answers came out before they were ready.  Don't get me wrong, I plan to live a life of argument, and I plan to win.  But for right now, my arguments will not appear in my music.

Music For Edgy and Intellectual Musicians

As I walking to class I saw one of my classmates.  This would have been fine except that both of us were listening to our ipods, and I'm sure we both had that sinking feeling "Oh no, I have to talk to someone now instead of staying lost in my tunes."  To her credit, she acknowledged this conundrum and laughed about it, and then decided to ask me what I had been listening to.  This reminded me of something one of my friends had told me about, where ipod listeners in New York City would confront each other and whichever one was listening to more obscure music was the "winner." 

"Dave Matthews Band," I said, acknowledging my defeat.

I made sure to clarify that the reason for this has been mostly to revisit my high school self, and that I don't fit into the usual stereotype of DMB fans. I am not a drunk frat boy with a popped collar, etc.

"Oh I never made those assumptions about you," she replied.  "I just assumed you had terrible music tastes."

Ouch!!

I told her that I usually listen to enough weird music that I had built up the credibility to occasionally listen to DMB, but by that point the music snob in me had officially evaporated.  The truth is, I'm used to people saying that the music I like is too weird, so being caught on a day when I was listening to something "mainstream" really threw me off guard.  I then started to second guess myself.  Even for those of us who claim to be interested in music as a pure art form are still influenced by the tastes and opinions of those around us.  For most of college I didn't listen to much DMB, perhaps to protest how popular they had become. Only recently I've come back around.

So when I saw my classmate again the next day I said, "Today I decided to listen to something edgy and intellectual."

"Oh, is it Steve Reich or something?" she asked.

Sure enough, the music playing on my ipod was Steve Reich's 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning composition "Double Sextet."  I sounded amazed that she guessed correctly, but she just said "Oh, I just know what edgy and intellectual means."

So I asked myself, if Steve Reich, one of the greatest composers in American history, can be put so neatly into a little box, then what makes him so artistically different from all the rock bands of the world?  What is the basis for the value judgments we make?

It's a hard question, but there has to be an answer.  Music fans of all genres cling to greatness, and if greatness doesn't actually exist, then all of us are under a collective fallacy, governed by no standards other than our own tastes.

I went to a concert in Rochester where "Double Sextet" was performed at the Eastman School of Music.  The concert was very well-attended, much more so than many other concerts I had seen at the same hall.  Particularly striking was the number of faculty members present.  The audience was pretty much a who's who of musical importance.  If you want people to know that you know what's up in modern music, then going to a Steve Reich concert is the way to do it.

Of course, nothing ever begins this way.  If the classical music establishment loves Reich now, it's only because he had rebelled against a different sort of establishment back in the 60s and 70s.  Reich came of age when dense dissonant music was still the norm, and by creating his signature free-flowing minimalism, he had the courage to do the exact opposite of everything that was expected of him.

So why is it that we can put Steve Reich in a neat little box?  Maybe it's because he invented the box.  But so did Dave Matthews.

When I was in 7th grade and all of my friends listened to Green Day, DMB's Before These Crowded Streets was "edgy and intellectual" by comparison, and most importantly, it felt authentic.  For me, DMB as fratboy champion didn't come until later.

I think we all want authenticity in the music we listen to, but that is balanced against an acute awareness of what everyone else is listening to.  If all the music you listen to is purposely obscure, then you can't sit around on Saturday night and compare favorite albums, because no one's lists will overlap.  At the same time, people do want to be the innovative listeners who have discovered something no one else has.  Listening is a social activity, and no one wants to be left behind, and certainly no one wants to be embarrassed.

But embarrassment has little connection to truth.  When someone says that a particular artist is their guilty pleasure, it says nothing about the content of the music itself, only that somewhere in society there exists a negative judgment about it.  But if you're anything like me, you don't want to be caught listening to something that may give away that your tastes are terrible.  All of these social issues go through the mind of a listener, and curiously, very few of these issues actually have any relation to the sound coming out, and how it moves us on an emotional level

So if authenticity exists, I have found it difficult to boil away all the other factors that determine why we listen to the music we listen do.  If you treat it like a sport, you're likely to lose often.  Ironically, it is the people who love music the most who try to outfox each other.  Perhaps we should not define ourselves by what we listen to, but rather how we listen to it.  If we listen to popular music with the attention any music deserves, then shouldn't that be better than listening to classical music just because we think it will make us seem smart?  Reich had it right when he said that the distinction between popular music and classical music is only artificial.  Similarly, I would say the the stock we put in someone else's opinion is also artificial.  If you like something, listen to it.  It should be that simple.  Of course, it never actually is.

Protect What is Important to You

Now that law school is in full force, I have asked myself whether or not I will have the time to focus on the new musical projects that I would like to complete.

The answer, of course, is that I have no choice. Every time I have made a conscious effort to set music aside and focus on other things, it has never lasted for long.  Let's keep it that way.

During orientation there was a faculty panel, and Dean Chemerinsky asked each of the professors to give advice for those beginning law school.  After the obligatory "I don't believe in giving advice" disclaimers, each professor had a couple of brief words. I don't remember anything anyone said, except for Prof. Glater. Perhaps he was telling us what we wanted to hear, but he said something which was important for me: "Find that interest that is not related to law, and protect that. Don't let anyone tell you this should be your whole life."

Of course, for me that interest is music.  And so I refuse to live by the notion that music has no place in the high-stress fast-paced world of law.  Otherwise I wouldn't have brought my recording equipment to Irvine. We are told to get an education to makes our lives better. But any life that closes off the important things is not worth pursuing. Rather than live in extremes, I would instead like to keep things as balanced as I can. I might be dreaming if I think I can make the album of my dreams during the first year of law school. But we creative types always live in a fantasy.

Comments on the Paul Ryan/Tom Morello Situation

Over the past few days there has been a little explosion in the media relating to the musical tastes of Paul Ryan, the Republican candidate for Vice-President.  Ryan claimed that one of his favorite groups is the left-leaning activist rock band Rage Against the Machine, but he went on to say that he only likes the music and not the words.  This provoked an angry response by guitarist Tom Morello, in the form of an op-ed in Rolling Stone Magazine.  This excerpt I found particularly interesting:

Ryan claims that he likes Rage's sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

I wonder what Ryan's favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of "Fuck the Police"? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!

Not that it has a great deal of relevance for the purposes of this discussion, but I support Obama in this election, and would probably find myself closer to Morello than to Ryan on the political spectrum.  Even so, I find Morello's response problematic.

Morello says Ryan can like whatever bands he wants, but then is quick to offer his own view about the correct way to interpret the music of Rage Against the Machine.  As a musician myself, I am sympathetic to Morello's stance.  To ignore the words in Rage Against the Machine's music is to ignore a huge component of the total product, and no artist wants to see that happen, whatever that particular component might be.  But when you break it down, Morello does not have a strong leg to stand on.  Who is to say what a particular piece of music means?  To the dismay of many artists, when something is submitted to the public for consumption, the artist loses the monopoly that he or she had on how that piece is to be interpretted.  And realistically, how can it be any other way?  Music is worthless if the listener does not have the right to assign his or her own meaning to what is being heard.  What good would a Monet painting be if everyone who looked at it focused on the same elements and we were all moved in exactly the same way?  When I listen to music it takes me to other places, places which are unique to my mind own mind and off limits to all others.

So then if Paul Ryan wants to listen to Rage Against the Machine only for the music and not for the words attached to it, no one has the right to tell him he should not do that, not even the music's creator.  Most musicians, including Morello I presume, want to be outlived by their music, to see it stand for all time.  We may think we can attach a little sticker saying "This piece means _____," and many musicians over the centuries have done this very thing. But the more time passes, the more the particular circumstances surrounding the composition become obscured.  That is not to say we shouldn't try to investigate the intent of the composer, but to take it as infallible would be an error.

A well-crafted song dealing with lost love, for example, can have a wide appeal because many people will be able to relate to that situation in some way, and few would find the topic controversial.  Political music, on the other hand, is purposely designed to be contrarian and to incite strong feelings about specific issues.  If music is universal, then political music is by far the most un-universal variation.  I'm sure some have felt that politics and music will always be an uncomfortable pairing for this reason.  Attempts to detach music from its political intent are nothing new.  Wagner's opera are still enjoyed by many today, even though they were laced with distasteful political messages.  The only other alternative would be to reject Wagner entirely, and from an artistic standpoint that is unacceptable.  So then it stands that the act of picking out what we like and rejecting what we do not like is a listener's right.  Paul Ryan can sort out the difference on his own.

The Other Album

A few weeks ago I posted a very weird instrumental track called "My Own."  After a little bit more post-production, mixing, and mastering, I have decided to release "My Own" as a single, and it is now available on digital retailers.

Aside from its length of 3:49, there is very little about "My Own" that warrant its release as a single.  There are no discernible words, and no appealing melody of any kind.  The point of the track is only to express layered electronic textures.  From a compositional standpoint, there is very little material to speak of.  But I guess the track's lack of appropriateness as a single makes me particularly inclined to release it in that form.  I've never been one to do things the conventional way.

Usually a track is released as a single to anticipate the upcoming release of an album.  But as I mentioned earlier, "My Own" does not fit the organic feel I want to have for the upcoming album "Hydrogen."  So I then thought "My Own" could be released as a stand-alone single, not attached to any album.  That is where the tracks stands right now.  However, I think about music in large chunks, and so I am fairly convinced that "My Own" will not remain an orphan for too long.

One day I was thinking about expressionist art.  (Don't you love paragraphs that start off like that)  The movement began started to gain ground in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  There are a number of famous expressionist paintings, and probably the most well-known is "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.  Wikipedia has this to say about expressionism: "Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality."

I had begun to think recently about creating a musical project based around this idea.  Of course, expressionism as a musical style already exists, and it is largely associated with the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg, and his followers in the Second Viennese School.  Now I don't intend to create an album of atonal classical music, but there is something that can be learned from it.  In the early 20th century time atonality was a new discovery, and it was used to convey certain emotions that previous music could not quite grasp.  Atonal music did not really catch on as it were, except in academic circles, perhaps to its dissonance and rhythmic obscurity.  But atonality as a way to express emotion, often uncomfortable emotion, did filter its way into the popular imagination.  (Seen any horror films lately?  Listen to the soundtrack!)

Just as atonality was a new discovery 100 years ago, I asked myself "What is the new discovery of today that has the potential to change music?"  Of course, the answer is electronics.  To be fair, electronics have been used in music for quite some time, but with the rise of digital recording and editing, the artistic potential of electronic music has really exploded in the last 20 years.

So if you were to mix the artistic goals of expressionism with the electronic technology of today, what would you get?  You might actually end up with something that sounds a little bit like "My Own."  So before long I found myself with the lead single I wanted, but it was the lead single to an entirely different album than the one I was already working on.

But why would this be bad?  "Hydrogen" is mostly written and planned, but very little of it is recorded.  "Expression," on the other hand, is mostly not yet written, but the parts that are written are already completely recorded because they were created spontaneously from the ground up.  Having another album as an outlet is actually quite healthy.  The tracklist for "Hydrogen" is already pretty much locked in, but I also wanted to allow myself to come up with other new music spontaneously, and not have to worry about whether or not it fit with "Hydrogen."  So having "Expression" as a vague parallel project will be a very good thing.  Just don't expect either to be done anytime soon. (At least you get to listen to the single...)

The "Nine Questions" press release

Finally, my last completed studio album "Nine Questions" is available on iTunes and other digital retailers.  I can now safely say I have the album where I want it, and to mark the occasion, I will not listen to it again for a very long time.

Why is this?  To put it mildly, this album took a lot out of me. Almost all of it was recorded by the end of 2010, and the final tracklist has not deviated since that time.  But for the last year and a half I have let the album sit on a hard drive, while occasionally spending a weekend adjusting the mixing and mastering.  This process was very frustrating because I was seeking sonic perfection, even though I knew all along I was not going to get it, at least not with this album.  I could have been the best musician and producer in the world, but I was still recording an album in my parents' basement using subpar equipment and free software.

But as cheesy as it sounds, the journey was just as important as the final product.  Over the last year and a half I have been listening to music more for its production value than I ever had before.  So many times I asked myself "Why can't I get 'Nine Questions' to sound as well-engineered as ______?"  (insert your album of choice).  And even the final version is nowhere near the audio engineering standards of today.  When I was a music major, I learned the elements of music, but I feel like "Nine Questions" has refined my skills of putting that music on record.  "Nine Questions" was an overly ambitious project, stretching over 20 tracks, 71 minutes, and countless musical styles.  It may have been unwise to be so ambitious, but the hard work of combing over every inch of it obsessively and repetitively made me into a much better producer as I begin new projects.

As for the music itself, it is very weird, and highly varied.  This is perhaps the other reason why I found "Nine Questions" such a difficult album to produce.  It was never clear that there would be any payoff, certainly not a financial payoff, but also perhaps not an artistic one either.  The album has some very interesting moments, but it does not follow a cohesive narrative, and the general flow is awkward at times.  There are long instrumentals stretches, and a fair amount of spoken poetry mixed in.  The album does not grab the listener in any meaningful way.  Furthermore, too many of the tracks feel like dead end ideas that could have been developed further, but were not, mostly because the album tries to cram too many styles into one product.

I suppose the idea for "Nine Questions" came to me from a song I wrote on the previous album that contained the line "now he falls into the sea, trapped by the questions, answers were irrelevant."  And so one day, I sketched out nine pieces snippets of text, none of which were actually questions.  The snippets were unrelated to each other.  Some were political, and others were spiritual, but they were all brought together by the last one, which simply said "Why?"  These nine fragments were used as the text for the album's title track, and formed the basis of all the lyrics on the album.  The title track serves as a microcosm of the entire disc.  So is "Nine Questions" a concept album?  Decidedly not!  The words on the album, just like the "questions" they are based on, don't relate to each other, except that they appear together.  "Nine Questions" has always felt like an uneasy collection for that reason.  Why should spiritual pieces appear on the same disc as highly political songs?  You could even go as far as to say that such a thing is highly inappropriate.  Even though the album is released with its original tracklist unchanged, I've never been comfortable with the juxtaposition, and that is part of the reason why I have decided to avoid political music on my new projects.  Even so, the political references on "Nine Questions" are vague enough to not be too upsetting.  Even though I speak with my music, I still want the listener to dig.  You're not going to know the meaning right off the bat.

Perhaps I've spent too much time discussing this album's shortcomings.  In truth, it is unlike any album you will ever hear, and whether that's good or bad, I leave that up to you to decide.  The other night I went for a 71 minute jog, and listened to the album in its entirety, my "last listen" (at least for a long time).  As I was running next to the Genesee River as the Sun was setting, I had a feeling I had been searching for a long time: "Nine Questions" felt like art.  I hope you enjoy it.

 
Cover art by Edith Hanson.  Many thanks!

I Drove Away: (new track with MP3)

Friday was one of those nights when nothing was going right and I didn't want to talk to anyone. So after going to Eastman to record some improvised piano over a click track, I came home and locked myself in my room to see what I could do with it. First I spent about an hour trying to figure why my beat software wasn't working right. (I think it's working now, but I still don't totally know what happened)  But around 10pm things started rolling.

Perhaps I'm making this sound too dramatic. But the music that came out was intriguing. And in less than 24 hours (including sleep) the track went from not existing at all, to being completely recorded and mixed. How's that for progress? If I didn't have a job, you might think that I could write and record an album from scratch in just two weeks. Crazier things have been done, I suppose.

As for the track itself, it is too moody. It is piano-driven, and with any piano-driven pop track you run the risk of the "cheesy factor."  I'm not sure why this is.  The piano is one of the most beloved instruments ever, but when not used correctly, can sound cheesier than other instruments might sound when playing the same chords. So I tried to mitigate the "cheesy factor" by creating strange electronic dissonances and using Mammut to create a menacing soundscape in the introduction and conclusion. Since the introduction and conclusion are played in free time without a click track, it was a bit tricky to overdub instruments on top. You might notice rhythmic inconsistencies as a result. Just try not to be bothered.

Here it is:

On Free Throw Percentage and Franz Liszt

        

People who know me know that my favorite sport is basketball. I've recently begun going to a court near my house and one day I was practicing my free throws and I thought about the process behind it. A few things came to mind:

1. There is very little variability in the task of shooting free throws. The height of the basket never changes, and the distance from free throw line to the basket never changes. The weight of the ball may vary slightly from case to case, but in an ideal world, this would not be so.
2. Due to the task having so little variability, it would seem that deliberate practice would improve one's effectiveness. Inversely, if the rules suddenly changed and stated that the free throw line must move arbitrarily between shots, then one could hypothesize that it would now be more difficult to practice the task of free throw shooting because the new variable would make the task less repeatable.
3. Free throw shooting is not a task which requires or benefits from creative thinking. In other words, there are no shortcuts to becoming a good free throw shooter, except deliberate practice.
4. You are only competing against yourself. There is no defense on free throw attempts, and it is impossible for the other team to somehow outmaneuver you into becoming a worse free throw shooter.¹
5. For some reason, free throw percentage varies greatly among professional basketball players. Shaquille O'Neal converted approximately 50% of his free throws,² whereas Ray Allen has a free throw percentage around 90%. Most players fall somewhere in between.

Now there seems to be a disconnect between item 5 and the premises that are established in items 1 through 4. Item 5 suggests that it is clearly possible for a person to shoot a free throw percentage of 90%, and items 2 and 3 would seem to imply that the best way to get there is through deliberate practice. Shaq no doubt could have improved his team's effectiveness considerably if he had put in the deliberate practice required to master the task of free throw shooting. So how do you explain his poor percentage? Perhaps Shaq considered his own value as a player to be so high that his poor free throw shooting was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.³ (This would certainly shed some light on his defiant reaction: “I make them when they count.”⁴

It might be better instead to consider marginal players who are also poor free throw shooters. For some players, free throw percentage could mean the difference between staying in the league and washing out for being too big of a liability to ever make it into the game in clutch situations. Or put more succinctly, it could be the difference between being a millionaire and not being one. And if one can become better at free throws simply by practicing them more, and not by some other factor outside of one's control (such as height), then it stands to reason that no marginal players should be poor free throw shooters because the risks of poor free throw shooting are too high from a career standpoint. But for some reason, such players do exist. Louis Amundson is a good example, who has only started seven games in a seven year career, while scoring just 4.0 points per game and shooting an abysmal 45.5% from the line.⁵ Poor free throw percentage is a serious liability for Amundson, and it would seem that this would be the element of his game it would be easiest to improve. So why doesn't he? After all, as far as basketball-related tasks go, free throw shooting is less complex and more repeatable than, say, figuring out how to drive to the hoop against a seven-foot-tall human being (a task which clearly fails item 4 above).

To highlight this problem, consider an example from the musical world. A couple of years ago I saw the Philadelphia Orchestra perform Piano Concerto No. 2 by Franz Liszt. The name of the soloist escapes me now. I'm sure I could find out his name if I did enough Googling, but for the sake of this post, I actually prefer to leave him anonymous as a subtle commentary on the lack of respect we give to classical musicians. Needless to say, the performance was totally lights out. I cannot think of another musical performance I have heard that had such speed and precision. This leads me to another set of points, which parallel the ones I laid out above.

1. There is very little variability in the task of performing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 2. The score never changes. Any variability is actually introduced by the performer for the sake of artistic interpretation. But any musician knows that artistic interpretation is best applied when you already have complete command of the piece on a technical level. Furthermore the level of precision required to memorize and reproduce an entire piano concerto would seem to be higher than the level of precision required to make, say, 80% of one's free throws.
2. There is not really any debate that deliberate practice increases one's effectiveness at performing a piano concerto. Just like the example of the moving free throw line, the concerto would be more difficult to master if, for some reason, the notes written on the page changed before every performance. Repeatability is key.
3. Playing a piano concerto does benefit from creative thinking, but mostly in the area of artistic interpretation. There are no real shortcuts to learning the piece on a technical level. Deliberate practice cannot be avoided.
4. You are only competing against yourself. There are no factors working against you trying to trick you into giving a worse performance.⁶

The ability to play a piano concerto varies greatly among those who play keyboard, and even among those who play professionally.

It is good to consider an important difference between music, which is open to interpretation, and sports, which are mostly judged by absolutes. Louis Amundson almost certainly increases his market value if he improves his basketball skills. On the other hand, if the keyboardist from Maroon 5 were to acquire the skill necessary to play Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 2, would that increase his market value? Probably not.⁷

Now if someone were to say “I will pay you $10 million one year from now if you either learned to play Liszt flawlessly or shoot free throws above 80%,” which would you choose? To me the answer seems obvious.⁸ So then is Louis Amundson just a lazy idiot, or is there more that goes into it than deliberate practice? Could we all learn to shoot as well as Ray Allen if we had the time and dedication? I do not know.

And then consider the examples moving free throw line and the piano piece that changes before every performance. Ray Allen is relatively a very good shooter from every spot on the floor. If the free throw line were to move before every shot, Allen's individual percentage might change, but the fact that he is a far better shooter than Shaq would likely not change. Similarly, a constantly changing piano piece would be more difficult to perform in an absolute sense, but a trained soloist will always be able to play it better than an untrained musician.

This all goes to show that specific skills do not exist in isolation. One does not become a great piano soloist by only playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 2 over and over again, but by playing a wide repertoire of difficult and expressive music. Ray Allen is a great free throw shooter because he is also a great three-point shooter and a great mid-range shooter. It is difficult to draw a one-to-one correlation between the time practicing a very specific task and effectiveness at that same task. This is because skills complement each other, and practice at one task could affect one's effectiveness at a similar task. So is Louis Amundson's free throw percentage low because he is not willing to practice that particular task, or is it because he is relatively bad at scoring in general, and his free throw percentage is just an expression of that? Either way, 45.5% is REALLY bad.

1 Though I'm sure players have found ways to out-psych opponents into missing free throws.^↩
2 The Wikipedia article for “Hack-a-Shaq” is unsurprisingly quite amusing.^↩
3 Does anyone know if this is really true? I'm legitimately curious.^↩
4 I've been told that all free throws count for one point regardless of game situation.^↩
5 On good days I can shoot nearly 50% from the line, and I'm going to law school, so I see no reason why someone making millions of dollars should not be able to shoot greater than 50%.^↩
6 Unless you count music critics. It's been said, “why do you need a license to drive a bus, but not to ruin people's lives?”^↩
7 Though I hope I'm wrong.^↩
8 And I consider myself much more of a musician than a basketball player.^↩

Hats Off to Paul Hofmann

So I just went to Kilbourn Hall at the Eastman School of Music and watched the jazz pianist Paul Hofmann give a truly remarkable concert featuring a number of guests who make up some of the best jazz musicians you will find anywhere.  Paul played a program made up entirely of the music of Keith Jarrett, not an easy task for any musician, and he knocked it out of the park.

Paul Hofmann was my piano teacher for four years while I studied at the University of Rochester, and I have to say I really lucked out. The Eastman School of Music is part of the University of Rochester, and even though I never could have dreamed of making it into Eastman myself, my status as a student at the University of Rochester allowed me to take advantage of many of the opportunities the Eastman School had to offer.  So in other words, I got to experience a piece of Eastman without having to be "Eastman material."  And from Day 1, I also felt like I was out of my league, that I was surrounded by genius the minute I stepped off the Red Line bus, and nothing I could do would ever match up.

And in most ways, I was absolutely correct. Everyone who goes to that school is on a different planet of musical excellence and that really can't be disputed.  In a way I had the most frustrating position of all, because I possessed musical knowledge myself, but only enough knowledge to realize why I'd never be as good as the rest of the people I saw walking around.

Despite my lack of confidence, I soaked up a great deal from Paul and my other teachers, Chris Petit and Michael Unger for organ, and Michaela Eremiasova and Elizabeth Kelly for composition.  But part of me looks back and says with one nagging thought:  "I wish I could have been a better student."  I wish I could have practiced a little harder, picked their brains a little more, and absorbed even just one more piece of musical inspiration. As an undergraduate perhaps I did stretch myself a little thin, being a double major frequently taking over 20 credit hours, while also managing a full plate of extra-curricular and volunteer activities.  Even within the music major I lacked focus, bouncing back and forth between piano, organ, and composition.  I do believe I made the most of time in college, but after seeing Paul's concert part of me wishes I had had the discipline to lock myself in a practice room for four hours a day and come out a genius.  But even if I had somehow conjured up the discipline, the fact of the matter is that I never was going to have the time, unless I had sacrificed other aspects of my undergraduate experience that meant a great deal to me.

Even two years after graduation, I still attend Eastman concerts frequently, and it is one of the things I will miss most about Rochester. There have been times when I walked out thinking "Why even bother doing music myself? I'll never be at their level!"  But at the same time the amateur brings forth a unique perspective to the mix.  When music isn't your life, it frees you up to think in a different space.  When there are no expectations to live up to, there is more potential for unique results.

So I exist in one of the following realities:
1. I have the best of both worlds. I was able to learn from the best while still maintaining the unique perspective of an amateur.  So despite my lack of technical skill, I can tap into musical ideas the professionals would never bother with.
2. I have the worst of both worlds.  My own level of musical skill will never exceed the level of an amateur, but I've seen the very best first-hand. So therefore I'm doomed to a life of never living up to what I know is really good.



Let's think positive thoughts.

"My Own:" the new track from out of nowhere (MP3 streaming)

Today I woke up and build a track from the ground up, with no planning prior to today. I started out with a couple of speech samples that were then gargled, reversed, and "mammutized." Combined with a kick and snare, they formed the basis of the drum track. A couple of synthesizer overdubs later, and here it is:



But now there is a problem. The tracklist for the album "Hydrogen" is already set. Even though most of the album is yet to be recorded, it's "written in my head" so to speak, and this new track I recorded today doesn't fit inside the tracklist I have already set. This new track is menacing, but sterile, whereas I intend "Hydrogen" as an album to be a little more warm, and a little more personable. So now what do I do?

Studio Outtakes: Part 1

So I just did some recording and for some reason I had a very serious case of the giggles. Not sure why, but here is the documentation:

"Sing Free:" the track that insisted on re-writing itself (with MP3 sample)

"Sing Free" is the first track from the album "Hydrogen" I began recording, and it's the track that was giving me the most hell. Perhaps that is because I was trying too hard; trying to make the beats too aggressive, trying to sing too high, trying to drown the whole thing in too much electricity.

So after a month of ignoring the half-completed track and letting it sit on my hard drive, I decided to turn it totally upside-down. I've heard other musicians say they sometimes like the results they get when they totally strip everything down, so that's what I did. And here is a snippet:


This snippet is far from perfect from a performance standpoint, but in a way I think that's part of its appeal. When I originally thought to record "Hydrogen" I said to myself "this is the album that will be more perfect and precise than anything I have done before."  This turned out to be nonsense. Of course, nothing is ever perfect unless it is generated completely by computer (and that right there can present its own set of problems).  So what I now realize is that "Hydrogen" will be appealing for the mixture of the organic and the exact, and hopefully I will be a skilled enough musician to keep up with the exact. So far it's been a tad questionable.

Another issue I've been having recently also emerged here. For some reason, my singing voice always tends to record better and richer when I'm playing guitar along with it instead of overdubbing the voice over a pre-recorded track. I still haven't figured out why this is so. It could have to do with feeling more connected to the rhythm of the piece, but that is all speculation. As a general studio rule, vocals should usually be overdubbed and not recorded live with other instruments, so I'm breaking that rule here for the sake of getting a recording that sounds "real," whatever that means.

The Inspiration Problem

When I was in school I took composition lessons from a really wonderful composer named Michaela Eremiasova.  One of the first pieces of musical wisdom she gave me was her belief that one's supposed lack of inspiration was a problem that could be overcome simply by hard work. If you don't like the ideas you're coming up with, continue to write anyway, because you won't get anywhere by sitting around and waiting to be inspired.

No one likes to hear this, but it really is good news.  Why?  Because when you take this principle to its natural conclusion, you can make the argument that all of our assumptions about the concept of "inspiration" might be thrown out the window.  If Michaela is correct, and I believe she may be, then excellence is something that is far more attainable than any of us realize because we don't want to admit to ourselves that it will likely take a great deal of effort to get there.

In popular imagination, there tends to be a desire to see "inspiration" not as something that can be acquired, but as a gift bestowed upon its recipients by the cosmic forces of the universe.  This is comforting for a great many people because it says "if you're not a genius, that's really ok."  And, of course, it is perfectly ok to not be a genius or an inspired person in most areas.

But this view also allows us to let ourselves off the hook.  The film, Amadeus, is one example I can think of that really promotes the idea of God-given inspiration.  In the film, the character Antonio Salieri cannot understand why God would withhold the gifts of musical inspiration from such a loyal servant as himself, and instead grant them to a scoundrel such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  The film, while great entertainment, hangs its entire narrative on what may be a flawed premise: Mozart is inspired, Salieri is not, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.

Of course, Mozart did possess a great deal of natural musical talent, but some have argued that it was just the result of deliberate practice undertaken from a very early age.  That's not to say that practicing 10 hours a day will turn a person into an inspiration machine, but it certainly helps your chances.  Composers are creative people, and you cannot just churn out greatness, but the more deliberate practice you have under your belt, the greater your arsenal of musical language.  We all lack inspiration at times, but if we have a solid foundation, we can somehow manage to fill in those gaps.

Could we all be great at something if we really wanted to?  It's hard to say, but what I do know is that if you take something by the horns, you're more likely to get where you want to go.  We don't like being told that we need to work through the problem.  It's much easier to stand back and wait for the light bulb to turn on, but most of the time, the problem doesn't go away on its own.

Bleeps and Blurps: The Difficult World of Electronic Percussion

I don't have drums or a drummer. Thirty years ago this would have been a major problem. Today it is a minor problem, but the process of solving that problem creates, as a sort of byproduct, unlimited opportunities for creative thinking. But this freedom no doubt comes with a caution.

At the risk of stating the obvious, here is the golden rule of electronic beats: If you're going to use electronic beats, do not use them to imitate real drums. Instead, use them to create new and different sounds that do not resemble real drums

In other words, no pattern you come up with using drum software is going to sound as good as a real drum kit. You can't really get around this fact. Non-drummers, such as myself, might trick themselves into thinking they've done it, but they're wrong. When I first started recording, and even as recently as a couple years ago, I broke this rule often, and it was a major problem for my music. That's not to say that it rendered the music unlistenable, it was just far from what it could be. I thought to myself "I like a rock sound, so I should create a pattern that sounds like someone playing a drum kit." Bad idea. It sounds fake every time.

Fortunately, the golden rule of electronic beats cuts both ways. Just as electronic beats cannot effectively replace a drum kit, most of the cutting-edge electronic music of today cannot be replicated by someone playing a drum kit. The moral of the story: everyone stick to what you're good at.

Indeed, there are no limits to what electronic beats can do, but you need to emphasize the electronic aspect.  Radiohead is an interesting example because they demonstrate both sides of the coin. They have a drummer in their band, so the usual "I don't have drums or a drummer" excuse does not apply to them. When the band went electronic, it was because they had a reason to do so, not because they wanted to fake something.

When you spend hours programming beats, it's easy to get caught in the monotony of it instead of taking a step back and saying "why am I doing this?"  Any sound you could think to record or synthesize can be sampled into a piece of software and used in a creative way. That freedom is liberating, but also daunting. Anything can be a drum...

Why Words Are (Not) Hard to Write

At my job I work as an advocate for crime victims, and on Tuesday mornings I sit in the arraignment part in Rochester City Court, meeting clients if they are there, and writing down the outcomes of each case, so my co-workers and I can call our clients and tell them what happened.  Arraignment court takes a very long time, and there are a good number of cases where I'm just waiting.  So I started bringing a notepad and during the wait, and I've been writing poetry.

When I write poetry in arraignment court, or at any other time, I make no effort to rhyme. In fact, my writing is just as close to prose as it is to poetry, but there is not a coherent narrative.  When I was younger it was the opposite. I had always tried very hard to make my first drafts rhyme.  Now, I almost never do that, and the rhymes are only added after the fact by ungarbling and rearranging the source material.

The shift in style was significant for me, and it occurred when I was a junior in college. I took a West African drumming class with a very cool instructor named James Holland.  I took the class despite already having a full schedule, but perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out to be the best thing I did all semester, a semester that was otherwise difficult.  We were required to keep a journal in class, and usually had to writes responses to various readings.  I enjoyed the journal because there were no rules.  It was "write what you feel."  One day James made an assignment that was unusual: "There's no reading. Just write the first thing that comes into your mind. Don't stop to even think about it. I don't want you to sensor yourself."

If there is anything resembling a "breakthrough" in my artistic life, this was a strong contender. I really went to town with this assignment. All kinds of bizarre insecurities came out, along with strange contortions of text, broken narratives, unexpected twists and turns, and a rawness I didn't know was possible.  The calculating and restrained version of me would never have thought to put it on paper.  The result was perhaps a little too weird for an academic assignment, but James got totally behind it.  He commented later, "I wish your classmates had really ran with this assignment the way you did."

So "free-writing" became the norm for me.  Whether it is poetry or prose, I don't know, but everything I have written since then has, in a way, been trying to chase that first high.  There is a certain freedom one gains from not having to worry about structure, form, rhyme, cohesion, or audience.  You can just write and charge ahead with a singular, if disjointed, purpose.

Now I hardly ever gaze at a blank page and wonder "what words am I going to write down?"  But the reverse dilemma can be equally frustrating. I've built up a somewhat sizable collection of word soup, and it's sometimes hard to pull up workable material from it, especially since I keep adding new ingredients every Tuesday morning.  For a songwriter, free-writing can feel like a strange exercise because typical song structures are far too rigid to accommodate the unfiltered text that may come out in these exercises.  Songs have meters, and the words need to fit in that meter.  Rhyme still remains strong in modern day song-writing even though a great deal of other contemporary poetry has already abandoned it.  Even though my free-writing exercises do not produce rhymes initially, I do make an attempt to organize the words into rhymes later because songs have a more natural flow when listeners hear those common tones.  This often means adjusting syllables, re-wording phrases to make rhyme, or even changing the word order entirely.  But is something lost in this change?

The process of sorting through pages of freely-written material can be problematic because you are editing the words and taking them out of the artistic context in which they were created.  Some songs I have written have actually taken some of their individual lines from two separate and seemingly unrelated poems.  This is indeed a necessary evil, but an evil all the same. Some words lose their true effectiveness when they are no longer in the stream of consciousness that exists somewhere between poetry and prose.  I suppose the reason why spoken words have always been an element of my music is because some ideas can only be expressed outside of the constraints of a rhythmic structure.  If, like me, you find words hard to write, I would recommend free-writing as an exercise as a way to at least get something down on paper.  Shoot first, ask questions later.

Confusion

I always get the names Maynard James Keenan and John Maynard Keynes mixed up. But one had very important things to say about the world we live in, the other was an economist.

 Just kidding (sort of). I don't actually know anything about economics...

Who is the Better Guitarist?

So who is better anyway?

Tosin Abasi of Animals as Leaders:

or...

David Gilmour of Pink Floyd:

Who can play faster?: Tosin Abasi
Who has more rhythmic precision?: Tosin Abasi
Who has more advanced knowledge of music theory?: Tosin Abasi
Who has probably practiced more?: Tosin Abasi
Who can come up with more complex musical structures?: Tosin Abasi
Who can better play in obscure time signatures?: Tosin Abasi *
Who has more mastery of many different musical styles?: Tosin Abasi
Who better understands classical counterpoint?: Tosin Abasi
Who can more effectively layer and overdub contrasting guitar parts?: Tosin Abasi
Who dresses better?: Tosin Abasi (not a real category, but really T-shirt and jeans while playing in front of thousands of people???)
Who plays more beautiful melodies?: David Gilmour

Who is better? Tosin Abasi or David Gilmour?: It's a tie.



Feel free to weigh in.

Toothpaste For Dinner

Comic from Toothpaste For Dinner. Sounds about right...

How to Make the Backstreet Boys Sound Evil/Awesome

Ok, I've officially lost it. Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy this piece of serious art that I am now presenting to you. In the tradition of "Justin Bieber 800%" I am now adding my own creative talents to the emerging genre of "Making Pop Hits Sound Like Space Aliens." This was all done using a program called Mammut that I talked about in an earlier post. I promise, if you click "play" you will not be disappointed! (If you get bored, skip ahead to the "epic climax" at around 3:00).




(I have to admit, I always kind of liked this song...)

The Mars Volta and More Comments on Loud Sound Files

I wrote in an earlier post about the Loudness War. This refers to the idea that sound files are being mastered so that they are too loud, and they lose sound quality as a result. This idea should not be confused with idea of the musical quality of "heaviness." Heavy bands can have well-mastered albums, and non-heavy bands can have albums that are mastered too loud.

The Mars Volta provide an interesting study because they are a heavy band, but they also have very loud sound files. All of their albums, with the possible exception of "Octahedron," suffer sound quality problems as a result. The newest release "Noctourniquet" is the loudest Mars Volta album yet, and is one of the loudest albums I have ever heard by anyone. When I say this, I speaking from an engineering standpoint, not a musical standpoint.

As I wrote earlier, the album "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is one of the most poorly-mastered albums ever. And so naturally, I was dismayed to find that "Noctourniquet" is about as loud as "Californication," though to my ears the audio damage is not as apparent on "Noctourniquet." I don't know enough about the science to know why this might be the case, but I do know that the two albums had different mastering engineers. In any case, both mastering jobs are unacceptable, in the absolute sense.

As for the music contained on "Noctourniquet," I think it's quite good. The Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands, and I think they have really pushed the "weirdness" boundaries, while still trying to maintain some level of accessibility. "Noctourniquet" continues that tradition without fail. Because I love this music, I find the production issues particularly frustrating.


So then there are three lessons I can take away from this whole thing:

1. Playing heavy music does not give you license to make your sound files sound terrible. The Mars Volta are a very heavy band. Distortion is part of their musical arsenal. However, the type of distortion resulting from excessive loudness is not in any way a good thing. Of course, if you were to crank the gain on a recording of Bach's Mass in B Minor, it would probably be more a more noticeable degradation than what is currently heard on Mars Volta albums (to my knowledge, no one has tried this yet, thankfully). In either case, it's degradation. I have trouble thinking of any situation where mastering an album too loud would be artistically beneficial.

2. If you take it as a given that your sound files must be excessively loud (of course, this is a ridiculous thing to take as a given), that doesn't mean you shouldn't still work to make things as good as they possibly can. "Noctourniquet" sounds less clipped than "Californication," at least to an untrained ear, even though both albums are about the same loudness. Fake it 'til you make it, I guess. But don't get me wrong, the mastering job on "Noctourniquet" still has major problems, and I certainly don't advocate a policy of "let's crank it as much as we can and then see if we can trick people into thinking that this sound quality isn't actually as poor as it is."

3. Is the end in sight? I'm sure people asked this question back in 1999 with the release of "Californication," but in 13 years we don't seem to have come very far. I think record companies need to make a musical version of a nuclear disarmament treaty. With things as they are, everyone is losing. But there is a natural limit. I'm pretty sure if anyone tried to make an album louder than "Noctourniquet," all listeners would start to notice that something was not right.


It could be that the biggest problem is us. We're the earbud generation. We're the Youtube generation. We listen to music for convenience, not quality, and we keep consuming these albums that have major problems. The only way to turn this around is to educate ourselves and each other about this issue, so that higher-ups in the companies will start to notice. It's all about supply and demand, after all. Unfortunately, however, Warner Bros. Records know that I'll still buy a Mars Volta album whether the volume is cranked or not. I guess I'll just listen angrily.

Music From a Time and Place

It's Novemember 2007 and I'm sitting in a piano practice room at the University of Rochester. This room was remotely located in the basement of the old gym, not one of the fancy rooms reserved for senior music majors. None of the pianos down there quite had the right action to the keys, but that was half the fun. You never knew what you might get. It had been a stressful day, and the harsh Rochester winter was on the horizon. As I got into the room I had this flood of energy, like some sort of angsty calling. "There's an emotion I'm feeling right now that I just need to record musically before I lose it."

This mad dash to the practice room with manuscript paper in hand resulted in a piano piece called "All the Right and Wrong Reasons," the title track for my album of similarly moody piano music from that time period. What I was so upset about is anyone's guess, and of course, when you're 20 years old, all emotions seem more melodramatic than anything a supposedly mature person might come up with. But this is precisely why "Reasons" intrigues me. Some fires you can only light once, and I'm just glad I got it on paper and on tape. Here it the original recording:



But now four and a half years later, I realize the same stuff is still there. Life is still confusing. There's confusion about life direction, confusion about politics, confusion about spirituality, confusion about romance, but somehow I've never really wanted to totally figure things out, because that would take away the impetus for the art. Now as I plan out a new album "Hydrogen" I have come to realize pretty quickly that "Reasons" needs to appear, albeit in a re-arranged and re-produced form, not because it is a particularly good piece of music, but because it means something to me. There is something intriguing about a remnant from the past that speaks with new clarity. Just because a piece is associated with a particular time, that does not mean the emotions it brings are out of date.

There's a certain intrigue about filtering your recent experiences through the lens of nostalgia. And the coming re-recording has a great appeal, as if I'm hoping the new me can provide, both as a producer and as a person, a more mature spin. Good luck.

I remember once I went to a talk by Prof. John Covach at the University of Rochester, and he said something that I found really interesting. "The music you listen to when you're young, say 18, 19, or 20, that music sticks with you forever." Now I wonder if that's also true of the music we write, not just the music we listen to. Maybe even more so.

Think about important events in your life, and the music associated with them. You might be intrigued by the connections you find for yourself. And I just want you to realize, it's not a sign of weakness, it's human.

In Remembrance of Earl Scruggs

Earl Scruggs, one of the greatest banjo players ever, has passed away at the age of 88. Scruggs was a key figure in the history of bluegrass, and he helped develop the three-finger style. If you are not familiar with Scruggs, check out this video of his instrumental hit "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."



When I hear Scruggs play, I am reminded that complex music can provide for just as much fun as simple music. Scruggs was a player of unparalleled ability, but he played music that appealed to all listeners. The joy contained in this music just overflows.

Why I Do Not Choose a Career in Music

When I say that I do not intend to pursue a career in music, this is not something that comes lightly for me. In fact, I have come to believe that a musical career is one of the greatest things a person can have, and turning away from it is something that I do reluctantly.

Now some may applaud this decision for its maturity, but I would not be so quick to agree. Practically-minded people will think that making a career out of music is a risk, but I would actually say the opposite. Making a conscious decision not to pursue a career in music carries a unique danger all to its own, and this fact is grossly overlooked. There are many would-be geniuses walking around carrying bitter what-ifs. Cubicles across the world are full of those who wish that they had taken the plunge when they were still young and care-free. People with hidden dreams of musical greatness appear anywhere you may look, but you would not necessary know it at first, because their music has taken a back seat to the mundane pressures of a "normal" life, and all the expectations society attaches to it. In my life I have also met a number of people who have, in fact, recognized this other little-talked-about danger, and followed the dreams that so many others do not. They decided to take the road into a musical life, not only because they recognized their own excellence, but also because any other path would be unacceptable.

These people are my heroes, and I do wish I were one of them too. But I have found a different path, one that I find equally fulfilling. For the last year and a half I have worked as a court advocate for crime victims, particularly victims of domestic violence. It is truly an honor to do this work. In this field I have found a new equally-important dream, one that uses my talents to the fullest and improves my surroundings. I have decided to apply to law school to further develop the potential impact I can make. In the excitement of this new discovery, I sometimes take a step back and say "But wait, what about music?"

When I think about it, this is actually a question that I have been grappling with for as long as I can remember. And I suppose the best answer I can come up with is another question. "Do I want to rely on my creative process for my income?" When it comes to music, and so many other things in life, I am a searcher. I write "weird" music because I wonder what new and exciting places it will take me. But the commercial forces that operate today don't share that curiosity. So if you were to ask me, "can you trust yourself to create something that will support you financially?" the answer is an emphatic no.

By making this decision, I want to reiterate that I do not think things would be better if everyone followed my lead. Quite the opposite, in fact, and in any field, there is surely room at the top. We need musicians who are forward-thinking and imaginative to do what I do not have the courage to do. The status quo needs to be challenged, and new ideas need to be brought forward, even if commercial forces push back the other way.

People have asked me "why not teach music?" It would seem to be the perfect way to improve the world, provide financial security, and do what I love. This is a very good question, and my answer is somewhat cynical. I believe people usually go into teaching for the right reasons, but they do not as often go into law for the rights reasons. However, the attorneys who do take the spirit of service to heart are the ones who are really doing a world of good, and I want to take part in that tradition. My choice is unique to my set of circumstances, but of course, my story does not necessarily need to be your story. I would say to anyone, whether you are musically inclined or not, that you should follow whatever path leads you to the most good, and no one except you can say what that might be.

As for me, music will always be part of my life. I have every intention of being an old man in a basement studio turning knobs on a mixer trying to reach that unattainable perfection. The only difference is, I will only need to answer to myself, and not the commercial forces that may or may not care what I'm doing. In a way, those of us who choose not to make a career out of music have the greater responsibility. We are the music-lovers, and we are the ones charged with supporting our friends who have done the right thing and devoted themselves to music full-time. If we the consumers of this art do not prop it up, no one will. And, of course, we must continue to contribute our own talents to the mix. It is far too easy for us to give up the faith, to let our creative processes fall by the wayside while we take care of our real-world problems. But we cannot let this happen. The more we sing in choirs, play in bands, or run through string quartets on the weekends, the better we become, and the more we add our voices to humanity's library, the better we make the world.

Repost: "I Hate World Music" by David Byrne

Thanks to Laney Widener for posting this really great piece by David Byrne:

"In my experience, the use of the term world music is a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant to one's own life. It's a way of relegating this 'thing' into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant; they are, by definition, not like us. Maybe that's why I hate the term."

Read his full essay here.

Levin's Requiem

In honor of Mozart's birthday, I want to offer a few words about a very special recording of his Requiem in D Minor, a recording which also happens to pose some really interesting questions relating to artistic integrity. Here I paraphrase the liner notes from that recording:

Mozart's Requiem (K. 626) is a milestone of 18th Century choral music, and is one of the most celebrating pieces of all time. Adding to the intrigue surrounding the piece, is the fact that Mozart died before it was completed. His wife Constanze hired the composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr to complete the work, and make it performable. Given the enormity of this task, Süssmayr, a minor composer, exceeded expectations, and his score remains the most performed version of the piece today. There is debate within the scholarly community about authorship, with some insisting that the sections attributed to Süssmayr far exceed his compositional ability, while others point to the fact that his sections contain minor compositional errors (parallel fifths, and things of that sort) that are simply not found in Mozart's output. Whatever Süssmayr's real contributions were, he is a major figure in the Requiem's history, and his work is an essential element of the piece's performance history.

Fast forward to the late 20th Century. Some musicologists have decided to revisit the score and correct the (albeit minor) problems that are found in it. Now this is considered to be a controversial notion. Some would ask if it is really defensible to tinker with a work that has stood the test of time, and is rightly considered a masterpiece. Furthermore, is it possible for modern ears to have any say in how this work "should sound," or are we far too removed from its original context? There have been several approaches, each with its own unique features. A layer of intrigue was added when, in 1962, a fragment of music from an Amen fugue was discovered, leading historians to believe it originally belonged as part of the Requiem, but no one is completely sure.

The musicologist Richard Maunder put forward a completion which omitted anything not thought to be written by Mozart, therefore eliminating two entire movements from the piece, but adding the Amen fugue. This seems like an extreme approach, first, because it is impossible to know exactly what was sketched out by Mozart himself, and also because it results in the exclusion of some very good music.

Duncan Druce takes an equally radical approach, but instead rewrites rather than eliminates the Süssmayr sections. Like Maunder, he adds the Amen fugue. This product, in some places, sounds quite far-removed from the original score. The Lacrimosa movement in particular is difficult to recognize in its new form. This is surely problematic. The Lacrimosa movement, even if not entirely written by Mozart is an iconic section that is strongly identified with the composer (even being used in the burial scene in the movie Amadeus, for example). Turning this movement on its head is a questionable choice.

Robert D. Levin's answer lands somewhere in the middle, using the Amen fugue like the others, but still addressing the project conservatively with the great care it deserves. He writes:

"The completion heard here seeks to respect both of the tendencies of the newer versions. On the one hand the compositional problems of the Lacrimosa and the Amen fugue, and the movements surviving only in Süssmayr's hand have not been overlooked out of blind piety before their 200-year-old origin. On the other hand, the historical and performance tradition of the Requiem demands respect. A clearly drawn line of separation, in which everything except the contents of Mozart's autograph draft was to be considered spurious per se, was explicitly rejected. Quite the contrary: the goal was to revise not as much, but as little as possible, attempting in the revisions to observe the character, texture, voice leading, continuity and structure of Mozart's music. I have retained the traditional version insofar as it agrees with idiomatic Mozartean practice."

I personally find Levin's approach the most convincing from a philosophical standpoint, but more importantly, the music itself sounds convincing. You might say it takes a certain amount of hubris to attempt to improve on a masterpiece. This is certainly true, so then I would say a little hubris can be healthy for artistic advancement. If we never tried new things or reinterpreted old things, we would not be where we are today. Part of what makes Mozart's Requiem so great is its mystery. If we could solve all the unanswered questions, perhaps we would not enjoy the work as much as we do today. Debate and discussion is half the fun.

What Sounds Weird Now?

In music we currently subdivide the octave into 12 equal tones, a system known as Equal Temperament (or Equal Temperament 12 to be more precise). This system sounds natural to us because it resembles the perfect ratios we want to hear from music. For examples, a ratio of 3:2 represents a perfect fifth (a C note to a G note). A ratio of 4:3 represents a perfect fourth (a C note to an F note). These perfect ratios sound consonant to the ears. Equal Temperament 12 does not match these ratios exactly. If it did, we would not be able to easily play music in every key. A tradeoff is required, and Equal Temperament 12 is generally considered to be the best system for being able to play in all keys, while still coming close to the perfect ratios we enjoy.

It is possible to divide the octave in other ways too. Consider Equal Temperament 15. It is the same principle, the only thing that changes is the number.
Listen to this composition by Jonathan Rabson that I found on Youtube:



Of course, it sounds pretty weird. But think about what it would be like if we only heard Equal Temperament 15 our whole lives, and then someone played in Equal Temperament 12? How would that be? I actually don't know the answer to this question. On one hand, Equal Temperament 15 is further away from the perfect ratios that humans seem to enjoy. However, if we had no context for Equal Temperament 12, I'm not convinced we would necessary be naturally drawn to it.