Achtung, Schattenjagers

November 23rd, 2023

We’ve fallen off of this a little bit, Matt Specter and I, but at one point we were excited to send this Chapter of The Story, Chapter 51, “Zek,” out every Thanksgiving. It was originally a Specter chapter, but I think it has truly come to belong to all of us.

Every year that one of us remembered, it went to at the very least, the people depicted in it, and often whichever poor souls we deemed deserving of attempting to relive a moment of our lives in Cincinnati.

It was new 26 years ago. Don’t let that sink in.

Reviews have always been mixed, but I like to think we created a Story Cinematic Universe that rivals the fair-to-middling productions by Tolkien, Marvel, Roddenberry, and Lucas.

This year, there is one Schattenjager in particular who needs to read it: James Brunner is dealing with a diagnosis of colon cancer, possibly as a result too many pops and pushes back in the 1990s (we never did learn how those cubes worked). He’s started a Yoda’s Thanksgiving of medical and surgical treatments.

Hopefully, laughter is still good medicine (the best medicine, of course, is usually, well, medicine), and hopefully this is still funny:

No quote fits this chapter.

_____________

“Mmm, come, come.  With a Jedi it is time to eat as well,” said Yoda.

Yoda had laid out quite a spread.  We didn’t know what anything was, but
there sure was an awful lot of it.

“Eat, eat.  Mmmm, good food, yes?  M-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hm.  Ohhh.”

We sat down around the tiny table, careful not to bang our heads on the
low ceiling.

“Mmmm…Came you very far, yes?  Hungry you must be!  Eat, eat.”

We looked at each other hesitatingly.  Quite frankly, the stuff looked
and smelled gross.  Finally, Saunders decided we had better not make an
incident, and started scooping himself some glop.

“Why all the food?” asked Saunders conversationally, as the rest of us
followed his lead and helped ourselves.

“Is it not holiday in universe from where you came?”

I almost dropped by plate of swamp algae.  I wasn’t shocked that Yoda
knew where we were from, but Yoda’s use of the word ‘Holiday’…

I looked at my watch, which still continued to function as if I were
walking around earth.  The date said 11/27.

“You made us Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked Yoda.

“Yes!  Yes…good food we have, talk we will.  Work I not on holidays,
whatever universe may they be in.  Come, eat, eat.”

I paused for a moment, then said genuinely and sincerely, “Thank you.”
The others turned to look at me, shocked by my sudden mood swing.
Slowly they seemed to realize that this really was our Thanksgiving
dinner, and that we should be truly thankful for it.  Yoda had gone to
great trouble to make us feel welcome.  I smiled, and took a bite of my
food.

It was nasty.  I chewed slowly, fighting the urge to spit it back out.
Everyone around me was having a similar reaction, except for Yoda, who
ate with wild abandon, constantly commenting on the quality of the food.

Suddenly, he stopped, and looked up in shock.

“Ohhh…” he said, “Forgot I the most important thing!”

We all watched with intent curiosity as he picked up an empty bowl, got
up from the table, went over to the corner of the room, and opened a
large door, revealing a small horse-like creature.  Yoda placed the bowl
on the ground in front of the horse-thing, then calmy went to its side
and punched it in the gut.  The horse responded by vomiting into the
bowl.  We stared in a mixture of horror, confusion, and nausea, as Yoda
brought the bowl back to the table, and began to spoon it over his food
like gravy.  Suzanne had her hand over her mouth, and Loren looked
green.

Yoda finished scooping, and offered the bowl to us.

“Use the horse puke,” he said, “Use the horse puke!”
__________________________

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Slipknot Still Sucks

November 9th, 2023

Once upon a time, when the current century and millennium were just getting started, I was a middle- and high-school band director in my mid-20s. In the months after 9-11, I met another band director in her 20s, Jenny, and we went out on a few dates. I had a lot of first dates over the years, a few second dates, and Jenny and I probably went out eighteen times or so, making our dating relationship fairly memorable in the context of my history. Since I mostly don’t keep in touch with old girlfriends, and we never knew each other in any other setting, we’ve long since lost track, but Jenny was the last person I dated seriously before I met my wife, Becky.

Naturally, I suppose, a few anecdotes about Jenny and me are official canon in my family, including the “Slipknot still sucks” story.

It happened something like this:

I took Jenny to a minor league hockey game for our first evening date. Not because we were huge fans or even knew much about hockey… it was my idea of something to do. As the game progressed, we talked about likes and dislikes, as one does, and we fell to talking about music, as one does. We both shared an interest in rock music, and we may have even been talking about classical music, for all I remember at this point: we were both conservatory grads and school music teachers.

At some point, Jenny noticed that the teenaged boys in front of us kept turning around to look, and she thought they were snickering about our conversation. I don’t know if they were amused by our musical preferences, or wondering what it was like to be dating as adults, or genuinely shocked that someone like her would talk to someone like me. For whatever reason, they weren’t minding their own business.

I don’t know where the next part came from. I felt relaxed and just happy to be out and about: I always enjoyed dating, for the most part. I wasn’t happy in my job, but I had a decent group of friends, and was always welcome at my parents’ house. I had been living in Springfield for a little more than two years, and was really feeling comfortable there and in Dayton, where I had met Jenny when we both brought students to an honor band at the University of Dayton. I was feeling a confidence I hadn’t always felt, and I was on a second date with someone who seemed like a real prospect.

The kids in front of us turned around to sneer again, and I said, loud enough to be heard, “yeah, yeah, Slipknot still sucks.”

The kids probably reacted with more snickering, but I don’t really remember, because Jenny cracked up laughing, and I felt like I had actually said the right thing for a change.

It was a moment when a couple of snooty, sarcastic Young GenXer musicians bonded over the superiority of their shared musical tastes vis-a-vis a few Elder Millennials at a minor-league hockey game in Dayton, Ohio–not exactly the Algonquian Roundtable, but it felt good.

Really, that’s all I remember from that date, a couple of decades on: a dis on a few kids who were the same age as the kids I was teaching at the time.

The dirty truth? I had never listened to Slipknot. Not knowingly. Not one song.

It was the era before streaming, before iTunes even, so it wasn’t a simple matter of pulling Slipknot up on the app (I wouldn’t have a cell phone for another three years). I was still building a classical CD collection, and picking up a few classic rock CDs here and there. My radio diet was mostly NPR, which I had discovered in college, and some classic rock radio. I had recently adopted a TV that my parents had replaced, bringing the number of sets in my apartment to one, but I didn’t have cable, and barely ever turned it on.

My students listened to Slipknot–at least some of them–and that’s how I knew the name, from their t-shirts and the graffiti on their binders. It was around this time that I knew of Eminem and Insane Clown Posse, but I hadn’t heard them, either. I also hadn’t watched Fear Factor, or Survivor, and I had even lost track of The X-Files, which had been must-see TV for me in college and just after. I was much more in a bubble than I am today, I think, ironically at the very age when the proton pack of mass culture was aimed straight at my face. I read books, and I went to movies, and I thought about classical music, with my social life centered around being in a concert band and a brass band.

Jenny and I didn’t last much into the New Year, 2002. I left Springfield the next summer, and started dating Becky: we were serious by Thanksgiving, engaged for the Blackout of 2003, and married in 2004. This post was almost an email to Jenny, but I don’t even have that anymore. My Outlook contacts lists an AOL account for her, and that seems, well, unlikely.

But I thought Jenny–or the void I shout into–might appreciate the collision of worlds that has happened recently.

Noah, my thirteen-year-old son, is into music, and was talking about bands one day. At some point, unprompted, he mentioned Slipknot, to which I replied with a quick, “Yeah, yeah, Slipknot still sucks.”

I don’t usually use that kind of language around the kids, although I’ve gotten a little more free with it when it’s just Noah and me. I think he was probably also surprised that I would just dismiss any music in that way: I’ve always wanted him to have his own tastes, and explore what he’s interested in. Besides, I bit my tongue for his obsessions with Kid LaRoi, Lil Nas X, and Billie Eilish when he was in late elementary school, and they passed. Mercifully.

My little quip about Slipknot, though, was cause for discussion. First, I had to explain why I had said it: as a catch-phrase, mostly, from a time I wanted to impress a woman on our second date. I didn’t tell him it was also a reminder of a moment when I felt loose, and free, and confident in the midst of a time that I rarely felt those things. A reminder of a time when people my age were tastemakers–for better or for worse–and could enjoy our first opportunity to lord our good taste over our juniors.

Then, the inevitable:

“But Dad, have you really listened to Slipknot?”

I don’t lie to my kids (although I omit freely and without compunction): I admitted that I hadn’t, not knowingly.

Noah then appears to have taken it on himself to become a Slipknot expert. Not all at once, but it has gotten to the point where he is annoying not just his mother and me but also his friends with his interest in a band from two decades ago. He can’t be bothered to remember slope-intercept form, but if Slipknot sang it or did it, he wants to know.

Of course, Slipknot’s entire oeuvre and all the information one might want to know about Slipknot is right there, ready to be beer-bonged straight from his smartphone into his brain, in a way that wasn’t really available to me in late 2001 even if I had been of a mind to determine the band’s overall level of suckiness. I’m sure some Slipknot fan or a hundred dedicated their Geocities page to them, or there were glossy fan magazines on the rack at Big Bear, ready to cure my ignorance of what, for all I knew, might be the greatest act since, I don’t know… Barry Manilow?

So now, a mere twenty-two years after my initial assertion in a moment of colossally-hubristic snark, I am faced with the music that I once denigrated without hearing a single note. Noah streams it whenever he has the chance, and he sings along with Slipknot in the shower. He argues that it is “real” music that takes “real” work, unlike the processed drivel on the Top 40. They wear masks! They once played drums sideways! One of them speaks Klingon! Slipknot built the Pyramids, and beat up Kublai Khan!

You, reader, may be worried for me: Do I now have to tell Jenny–or absent that, the world–that I was wrong? Has that moment when I felt like I had a handle on things actually been built on an untenable assumption, and does one of the bright spots in a frankly difficult part of my life turn out to crumble?

More importantly, am I just some kind of a**hole with none of the cultural credibility my generation holds so dear?

Well, I’m here to tell you, having considered it more closely:

Slipknot still sucks.

Thank God.

Post-script: Things mentioned in this post that still suck:

  • Slipknot (Duh!)
  • Slope-Intercept Form
  • 9-11
  • The Blackout of 2003
  • Big Bear (or rather, the fact that Big Bear no longer exists)
  • Fear Factor and Survivor
  • smartphones

Post-post-script: Things mentioned in this post that don’t suck:

  • Becky
  • Noah
  • Minor-league hockey
  • First dates
  • Dayton
  • The X-Files
  • Showers

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Elby Arrives

October 19th, 2023

Yesterday marked the end of an important project in the life of the Lakeland Community College Music Department, and the beginning of an era that few if any now at Lakeland will see to its end. We took delivery of our new Steinway Model B grand piano, christened Elby, to become our primary concert instrument for the next fifty years.

I had been to New York in September with our dean, Dr. Erin Fekete, to tour the Steinway factory and select our instrument, with the help of Kim Speiran of the Cleveland Institute of Music. Being in a room with five identical-looking pianos and being told to choose one was daunting, but we listened and quickly learned their unique tones and personalities. The three of us zeroed in on the same instrument, second from the door. I assured the piano–pronouns they/them–that they would be happy with us at Lakeland, and then we were off to prepare for the trip home.

Now, a month later, we got the call that delivery was at hand. Like anxious parents awaiting a newborn, we adjusted our schedules, made final preparations, and alerted the necessary people. Erin was off-campus for the day, but Kim joined us again to supervise Elby’s move-in, conducted by Atlas Moving.

At 1pm, the call came: they were on campus. I dismissed my class early, inviting them to watch professionals do their work, which is always fascinating and enlightening: it was, after all, Music Appreciation, and a proper appreciation acknowledges that the musician is only the tip of the spear, reliant on so many others to be able to perform.

With unsurprising deliberateness and sure-handed strength, they rolled Elby in, attached their legs, and removed the wrappings. For a moment, Elby stood next to their predecessor, and there were two Steinway Bs on the stage of the Rodehorst Performing Arts Center. It was not to last, though, and next the old piano was on its side, legless, and out the door to Elby’s place in the truck. The piano dolly stood empty: relieved of its thousand-pound and forty-year burden.

A few minutes later, Elby claimed the dolly that will preserve their legs and the stage floor, and Kim installed the strike plate for the keyboard lock: like a droid’s restraining bolt, it will limit access to those musicians with prior approval, marking Elby as someone’s property–the property of the Lakeland community, entrusted to the College’s staff and faculty.

Elby then stood before us, sparkling and new. Dr. Laura Barnard, provost, administrative force behind Elby’s coming to Lakeland, and Elby’s eponym, paid a quick visit to the stage, but couldn’t stay long. I promised her I would share a video of the first music to come from Elby on our stage, as well as photos I had been taking through the afternoon.

Now it was time. I had decided that, while I wouldn’t be the first person to play Elby (many hands had already touched their keys), or the first person to play them in “normal” use for a rehearsal or concert (there were two jazz band rehearsals that evening, the first of myriad to come), I would play the first music heard in the new hall, as well as I could.

But what to play? There was for me no equivocation: it would be Bach.

I have written many times in this space about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and its importance to me as a musician, strange though it be for a trombonist. It is a great sorrow in my life that I can’t do Bach’s work justice as a pianist, but nonetheless anyone who has known me as a musician from my college years forward has seen my enthusiasm for the Leipzig cantor.

In New York, at my request, Kim had played Bach for us on all five pianos before anything else. For luck, I said, but also because Bach’s music, written for smaller eighteenth-century instruments, resides solely in the piano’s most-played middle register. But more, Bach is a talisman for me, as for many musicians. In the compact disc era, when the only music you had on the road was the discs you brought with you, I never left town without Bach.

And so, at this moment, I pulled my battered and well-marked copy of Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier from my bag. Opening it to the first prelude, in C major–one of the few pieces in that collection that I can hope to perform passably well on short notice (or ever)–I handed my phone to Tim Dorman, and asked him to record the moment.

The video shows a version of me older and heavier than I like–this awkward longer and grayer hair that I’ve been wearing, something of a paunch, and a double chin, but I move with certainty, adjusting the bench, addressing myself to Elby, and then a short speech: “The first music on our new piano, the first prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.”

And then to playing. I am not a good pianist, and my performance was far from perfect; a little more practice at home would have been a good idea, but the C-major prelude is forgiving, as was my audience. Elby gave my clumsy fingers fantastic voice, with the middle register that I so admired in them in New York very much in evidence. The simple arpeggios in their repetitive, hypnotic fingerings let me focus on drawing sound from Elby’s keys and strings. Though still shaking off the dust of their recent journey, still growing accustomed to being once again properly supine rather than decubitus, and now feeling the Ohio fall air, Elby made me a better pianist than I probably am, for all my finger slips and hesitant changes of position and outright musical stutters.

I played the final flourish of the prelude, and with a few cheers from those assembled–Kim, Tim, myself, and a few students–the music was over. Elby was again silent and awaiting human touch. Kim had a few more adjustments to make following the shaking and rattling of highways and roads from Queens to Kentucky to Boston Heights to Kirtland, but she was not yet ready to give Elby their first Ohio tuning, allowing them a Sabbath to rest and recuperate before the twisting and stretching of pegs and strings that must be to an instrument like so much acupuncture: setting things right but not without a little pain.

What music will Elby help make? What shows will they accompany? What concerti will they shine through? What pianists–student, faculty, staff, or guest–will sit where I sat yesterday, face to face with seven feet of maple and iron and felt, and draw patterns of sound from Elby’s keys and hammers and strings? What musicians will navigate Elby’s inevitable quirks and foibles as they navigate the quirks and foibles of their fellow humans to practice their craft?

In all likelihood, like my children, Elby will persist after I am gone from Lakeland and from life’s concert, a half-century or more, and leave as much or more of a mark on our community as my own teaching and department chairing.

In that moment, we stood in awe of newly-arrived Elby. I thought of the moment I held my eighteen-hour-old son and sang “You Are My Sunshine” to him in the quiet of his hospital room, lungs unsullied by soot, heart pure and untired, soul pristine. They were perfect, Elby was, like a newborn, and full of the promise and potential of the better part of a century, standing shining in the dawn of a new saeculum, a moment most of us will not see again at Lakeland: the day when an old grand piano left and a new one arrived.

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Podium Concerns

September 26th, 2023

If you’re like me, you’ve been following the drama unfolding at the Cleveland Institute of Music surrounding their current orchestra director, Carlos Kalmar. If you haven’t, here’s an article from last week that sums things up: https://van-magazine.com/mag/cleveland-institute-of-music-carlos-kalmar-discrimination-bullying/

It occurred to me that a few ideas about the direction we all ought to take as ensemble leaders might be in order.

We live in a time and place where educators are expected to pay close attention to the emotional needs of their students. Gone are the days when sarcasm, vitriol, and personal attack were accepted as marks of sincerity or even genius in a conductor. We have all been musicians in this type of situation: I myself played for several years in a community group led by a man whose podium talk resulted in an almost continuous turnover in the membership of the group.

I stayed because we played well, and I had a group of friends in the band, but we could have been better if that director’s nastiness hadn’t driven away many good musicians. I never felt personally attacked, but I saw good people and good musicians bullied out of the group by a director who relied on intimidation and verbal abuse.

As a twenty-something trombonist in that group, I felt challenged and pushed to be the best musician I could be, and I felt that I was learning from people who were vastly more experienced than I was (I learned how to tear apart a Sousa march and make it really hum along in that band).

As a forty-something father, I wouldn’t want my children to come in for that kind of abuse, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t stick around for it, either. (Even though I never felt like a target, that director eventually declined to write a recommendation supporting my application to graduate school, so that’s about where I stood with him).

Today, it is incumbent on us as musicians, leaders, and music educators to find a balance between rigor (and the honesty that goes with it) and kindness.

So: some friendly suggestions, take them or leave them:

  • Be aware of the variety of ability levels, ages, and backgrounds in our community groups. Some of your musicians have multiple music degrees, while others have only part of a high school experience. Some are retired and have plenty of free time, while others might be full-time college students with full-time jobs.
  • Remember that your two-hour rehearsal should include a break. This is built into the class schedule as the 15 minutes past two hours, but many of us just wrap 15 minutes early… it may be time to revisit this policy. At one time, the Civic Orchestra used this as a coffee break, and there was socialization (the coffee pot is still in the locker!).
  • Balance teaching music and making music. There should be some of both in your rehearsal; I tend to lean more on teaching early in the rehearsal cycle and making music later.
  • Strongly consider playing or singing every note at every rehearsal. This isn’t always what we would do in a daily rehearsal, but remember that someone who misses a weekly rehearsal could very well go two weeks without looking at their music.
  • On a related note: tell musicians what they should practice, but in the back of your mind, don’t depend on outside practice. They all have busy lives.
  • Similarly, consider giving a week’s warning to a section before you jump into that one difficult passage.
  • Consider holding sectional rehearsals: we all have musicians in the group who could run their section if you split the group up. This eliminates the trombonist’s dilemma of waiting through long stretches while others practice their parts.
  • Have a plan: going into rehearsal with a detailed plan keeps you focused and gives energy to the proceedings. My plan usually consists of a set amount of time for each piece along with a list of “spots” and possible solutions.
  • That said, be flexible: the military adage is that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” and it’s true in rehearsal, too.
  • Consider recording your rehearsal.
  • Don’t forget to practice yourself: mixed meter is the bane of my existence, but I love modern music, so what’s a guy to do? I wave my arms around like a crazy person with a baton at home until I’ve got it.
  • Everyone in the group is doing the best they can that day. It will never be perfect, and any imperfections are not personally directed at you.
  • Say “please” and “thank you” a lot. All of our arm-flapping would be pointless without the people in front of the podium.
  • Don’t be afraid to acknowledge your own shortcomings—and then work on them!
  • Before you say something, use the THINK acronym: is what I’m about to say True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, and Kind? Above all, be kind.

I became aware of Bible verse that has a lot to do with how we perceive ourselves on the podium and as teachers, and when it was in the sermon a few weeks ago, it really stuck with me:

“…Jesus said [to the Pharisees], “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’.“

Matthew 9:12-13 (New International Version)

There’s a whole context here, but the question we should be asking is whether we are demanding sacrifice from or offering mercy to our students and musicians.

For many years, I didn’t offer mercy to students, and demanded only sacrifice, and it made all of us miserable. I hope that you can learn from my mistake in this! Students have trouble learning and musicians can’t make music when they are constantly asked to sacrifice for our vision of their art but not granted mercy in return when life keeps them from achieving that vision.

I’m happy to discuss any of this with anyone, and certainly, I would love to benefit from everyone else’s experience, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

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The ChatGPT Blues

June 30th, 2023

I wanted to share a discussion forum post I made this morning in my Lakeland Community College Course, MUSC 1800: Popular Music. Usually my prompts for discussion forums are centered around primary source material, but the prompt in this case is to write a verse of 12-bar blues lyrics, using a model that is discussed in our textbook and in the supporting materials I provide, including a Google Form to help students along. ChatGPT’s answer to the prompt is actually indicative of the mistakes some students tend toake on their first attempt. Here’s my post:

So, like many of your professors, I’ve been thinking a lot during 2023 about ChatGPT and similar AIs and what students and teachers might be doing with them. Of paramount and immediate concern to many of us is whether ChatGPT can do your assignments for you. So far, my finding has been a resounding “no, not if you want full credit.” But… it can probably help you as well.

To that end, here’s a short conversation I had with ChatGPT this morning:

Dr. Saunders: Write a verse of lyrics for a 12-bar blues about ChatGPT

ChatGPT: 

Well, I’m a ChatGPT, baby, here to please
I’ll answer your questions, just like a breeze
I’m an AI, powered by GPT
Ready to rock, come and chat with me

I’m a language model, with knowledge so vast
From history to science, I’ll make it last
Ask me anything, I’ll give you my best
In this digital world, I’m your friendly quest

I’m the blues of the internet, keeping it real
Analyzing data with an electric feel
I’ll write you lyrics, with a soulful touch
Bringing the rhythm, you’ll love it so much

So come on, let’s groove, in this digital zone
With ChatGPT, you’ll never feel alone
I’m here to entertain, 24/7
Just type away, and let the blues of AI heaven

I would say that the first thing you should notice is that ChatGPT gave us multiple verses when I only asked for one. That’s OK… I wouldn’t take points off for showing more creativity than is strictly required. However… our model for 12-bar blues lyrics is three lines, with the first two lines being similar to each other and the last line rhyming with the first. It’s clearly not doing that. But, as I discussed in my previous post, the three-line structure is typical of early blues, but was modified by later musicians, so maybe we can use some of this.

I’m not an English professor. To me, the quality of these rhymes is really just so-so, but the content of the lines is pretty good. I’m going to rewrite the first verse a little:

Well, I’m a ChatGPT, baby, and I’m just here to please. [bars 1-2, instrumental response in 3-4]

Well, I’m just a little ol’ ChatGPT baby, and you know I’m here to please. [bars 5-6, instrumental response in 7-8]

I’m gonna answer all your questions, just like an AI-powered breeze. [bars 9-10, instrumental response in 11-12]

This fits our model better… I think the most powerful potential for AI for students right now is this kind of thing: maybe you understand the way 12-bar blues works fairly well, but coming up with poetry is not your bag. ChatGPT is here to help.

Now… could you have given a more specific prompt and have the AI spit out a verse that does fit our model? Possibly. I’d love to see your results in this thread, but if you work with ChatGPT or something similar, academic honesty means that you need to let your instructor know.

(Saunders, Matthew. “ChatGPT Blues.” Posting in “12-bar Blues Forum” in Blackboard Ultra site for MUSC 1800: Popular Music Summer 2023 CRN 40149. Lakeland Community College. June 30, 2023.)

So… what am I trying to do here? I’ve been thinking about ways that I can use AI as an ally, and encourage my students to learn use it as a part of their toolkit, both now as learners, and later as workers in some capacity: where I only have to deal with AI for the second half of my career, my students will be dealing with it as part and parcel of what they do… much like the difference in the way a Boomer would have related to e-mail vs. the way a Gen Xer would have approached it. Building and learning to use a toolkit is in part, I think, what students should be doing in a general education course in the humanities.

When I took statistics in college in the mid-1990s, I learned a great deal about statistics, but I also had assignments that were due in a software program I had never used before, Microsoft Excel (music majors didn’t do many spreadsheets in those days). As it turned out, I have used Excel or a program like it in every job I’ve had since graduation (except the summer I sold shoes at Dillard’s), in my artistic and personal work. When I worked on my DMA document (the not-quite-a-dissertation you write when you earn a Doctor of Musical Arts), Excel was a big part of my process. ChatGPT and programs like it are probably the Excel of Gen Z.

“Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.”

—Adventures in Babysitting

At the same time, we make non-majors study the humanities because being “educated” (as opposed to “trained”) means that a person has the skills to reflect and think about what it means to be human, about whether decisions are right. This little experience with ChatGPT shows that AI can make a stab at writing the blues, and even if it doesn’t get it right, it can still be helpful to a human who has an assignment to complete. But that’s not what the blues, or any musical expression, is, is it? The blues is taking the difficult parts of a human life, and putting them into an experience that we share with other humans. We can think about the reasons humans might like to do this: catharsis comes to mind, but there is also the need to share with others and to feel not alone. There is the satisfaction that the listener gains too, from feeling that someone else is living this life. My students have to write blues lyrics because I tell them too, not because they have the deep-seeded need to express their pain and anguish (which they may do in other ways, and which I try not to contribute to). In that sense, is their experience of the blues more like the experience of an AI trying to write the blues?

Last, I have a job to do, and as much as I’ve always worried about my fundamental ability (or lack thereof) to know whether the person registered for an online class is actually the person doing the work, ChatGPT should have us all reconsidering what we assign and how students might complete that assignment. I gave a very simple prompt, and ChatGPT bombed the assignment. This has been my experience so far every time I’ve given assignments from my class to ChatGPT, but it’s only a matter of time, they tell us, before AI will be able to produce convincing creative work.

So, I think the next time I run this class, I’ll modify this prompt: I’ll ask students to use ChatGPT or some other AI to create blues verses and copy the conversation into the forum. Then, the class can critique the verses, just like I did above, and demonstrate in that way their understanding of the 12-bar blues form. Or something else. Keep the machines guessing, everyone!

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The Rock Star’s Art and the Rock Star’s Life

May 8th, 2023

The online versions of my courses contain discussion forums, dreaded by all online students, but I’ve worked for years to get them to be something effective. Like everything I try in the classroom, there seem be times and classes for which they work very well, and times when everyone is just going through the motions. I keep a number of “starter posts” on hand so that if a class is slow to get going each week and crowds the deadline, there’s something there for students to comment on. Here’s one I wrote recently for a discussion of offensive lyrics in music:

I’ve struggled for a long time with rock music in particular and pop music generally for its lyrical content, and I’ll explain why:

There’s a reason I chose music as my profession: I love it for its own sake, and the experience of music, broadly, is an enjoyable one for me. In fact, I love it so much that when I go to live performances, I get really annoyed and bothered by anything that distracts from the music: as you might expect, this means the rock concert experience is very frustrating for me most of the time, and I usually prefer listening to records to being in a live rock performance. You may think, “Well, this is just a grumpy middle-aged guy,” but believe me that I’ve always felt this way, from the first time I ever heard a rock concert and realized that people didn’t just sit politely and listen (the band was Hot Pursuit, a rock band made of Columbus police officers that changed the words to well-known songs to have anti-drug messages, and they played in my middle school auditorium in 1988 or so: here’s their awesome video: https://youtu.be/bQt1yjZeVvs; I believe they actually got paid by the police department to do this at least part-time).

Another quirk about me is that I tend to focus so much on the music that I either don’t really listen to or don’t understand the lyrics. I really am just more interested in the music, and I have to *make* myself think about the words most of the time. Ironically, this is, I think, the opposite problem from most students in my classes: the non-musicians are generally more in-tune with lyrics and apt to think of the contents of a song being its lyrics rather than its music. To me, though, I might as well be listening to a song sung in a foreign language most of the time.

And imagine that situation for a moment: a person who doesn’t speak English and learns lyrics phonetically might not understand whether a word or line is offensive; or, someone from outside a culture who does speak the language of a song still might not understand the nuance in the lyrics.

Sometimes lyrics have deliberately mysterious, veiled, or coded meanings, or just meanings that escape much of the mainstream: I think of The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A,” which many people (especially post-1990 people) think of as a fun disco song without realizing its homage to gay hookup culture.

So… I am repeatedly surprised by what song lyrics actually say when I stop to listen to them. They depict a world that is much broader than my personal experience, and this is at least partly a good thing. I have mostly lived a life that is not very much like the lyrics of the songs I’ve listened to in that life, and that is largely by choice. I mean, my relationship to pop music is mostly that I teach about it in a state-subsidized school and while I’ve performed in popular styles a lot, that wasn’t the focus of my training, and I’ve never tried to make a living at it. I certainly haven’t lived the “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” life that rock songs tend to describe, or the gangsta life that is so often a part of hip-hop, or the good times country life, and most of my life since my mid-20s has not been about the kind of relationship drama that fills pop songs.

And in some ways, this is what art of all kinds does: it allows us to step into a life other than our own, whether it’s a rock song about the sex a teenager wishes they were having, a video game that allows us to experience combat without actually getting hurt, a TV sitcom where we can laugh at problems instead of agonize over them, or a book that transports us to a time and place we couldn’t otherwise experience. This is a great thing.

But the more I listen to rock lyrics and the more I read about the lives of rock’n’rollers, the more I see that, for many of them, the lyrics aren’t just fantasy and reflect the actual reality of their lives. “Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” isn’t just a slogan, and it’s hard to find a rock star who wasn’t an addict, an abuser, an adulterer, a pedophile, or some combination of those. Songs about drugs are usually written by people who take drugs, and songs about sex with young girls are usually written by people who have sex with young girls. The lyrics may be coded, or their hit songs may seem innocent, but getting into deep cuts will often show you more of the true person.

And no one should be surprised by this, I suppose: very few people get from relative obscurity to the top of their field–any field–without ambition, obsessiveness, enormous ego, and at least a general willingness to be self-serving.

I’ve been reading a new biography of Chuck Berry (R.J. Smith’s Chuck Berry: An American Life) this month, and what stands out about Berry’s story is the way that he turned his fame and money into ways to constantly exert his own power over other people to get them to do what he wanted (usually in sexual ways… he was more or less clean and sober in terms of substances). There is complexity and nuance: his need to exert power came from his background as a Black man in mid-century St. Louis and the constant racism that he endured throughout his career. But he still comes off as a fine example of toxic masculinity. We study Chuck Berry for his mid-to-late 1950s songs like “Maybelline” and “School Days,” but his only Number One Pop single in the US was one of his favorites to play in concert, “My Ding-a-Ling,” an ode to the joys of masturbation. Berry got his jollies from getting the audience to sing along with him in a song about his manhood: exerting his power as a Black man over a mostly-white audience.

So: people can live their lives, and what goes on between consenting adults is just that (if your kink is doing things without consent, I don’t have any sympathy). But I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of art, especially by artists who aren’t trained “formally,” comes from a place of authentic experience, and the simplest answer is that an authentic pop song is rarely a contrivance to convince us that someone is something they are inherently not (although the contradictions between public image and private persona can be fascinating study!).

Thus, when Axl Rose, or Professor Griff, or Andrew Dice Clay make art that is offensive, or demeaning, or insensitive, I think we have to believe that is who they are, on some level. When they make comments in interviews that are misogynist or racists or anti-Semitic or homophobic, we have even more evidence that this is what they believe. Yes, over time, a person can change their ideas and behaviors, for a variety of reasons, at least in their public-facing self. Yes, someone can apologize or make amends, or even pay restitution or serve prison time (Chuck Berry spent 18 months in federal prison on crimes related to a 14-year-old girlfriend… in true Berry fashion, he said he was grateful for the time he spent finishing his diploma and taking business classes so that he could manage his own money, and his record label did everything in its power to keep the full story out of the public eye).

If pop song lyrics–clean, dirty, offensive, sexual, chaste, worshipful, fantastic, gritty–come from personal experiences, we as listeners then have the task of figuring out what we do with those tales. We may choose to like them because they reflect our own experiences. They may reflect our ambitions or alternate versions of ourselves that are better or worse, or just more exciting. They may inspire us to do better, or to reach for more, or they may commiserate with us when we feel we have failed. As I’ve said, they may simply open windows to experiences and lives we won’t, can’t, or don’t want to live. For me, it’s all too easy to ignore the lyrics and focus on the music, and that, of course, is missing the point.

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The (Mostly) Empty Horizon, or, Is Anyone Looking for Something to Play?

February 12th, 2023

I was updating the News page on my website, which I hadn’t done in a while, and I realized that there wasn’t all that much to say: the horizon is mostly empty at the moment. While this would be frightening if I were a full-time composer, and honestly isn’t a great feeling for this part-time composer, I’ve accepted over the past couple of decades that composing work and performances of that work both come in fairly cyclical ways, and the storm of managing multiple projects and deadlines occasionally gives way to clear skies. In some ways, I’m reaping what was sown in March 2020: I decided to slow down my work on composing new music in order to make sure that I was focusing on what my family might need during the pandemic, while at the same time, lots of performances were postponed or cancelled. The postponed performances have now mostly been presented, but lots of people still aren’t back in their “normal” groove, and at least a few of my collaborators find themselves in different positions in life than three years ago. I took about two years to really get back into a composing routine, and even so, I haven’t been putting as much time in as I was pre-pandemic. My output has slowed, and I haven’t worked as hard on the “softer” side of the work in building connections and showing my face (we’ll see if my experiment with leaving social media last year will ultimately doom my composition career).

You get energy out of a system when you put energy in, and I truthfully have been putting less energy in over the last couple of years. It isn’t that I’m no longer interested in composition: it’s just that, as for everyone else, life has been in the way. I recently listened back to a podcast interview I gave to Kendall Halman six years ago when I was in a really different kind of place, and I don’t recognize everything about myself (unsurprisingly). I don’t know that I like the guy in the podcast better, exactly, but I was honestly more assured about my place in the music ecosystem.

So, I’ve been trying to do better: submitting to more out-of-town opportunities, for one thing, although outside of the conference circuit, which I haven’t really done since 2020, I’ve never had much luck here. My sense is that most opportunities online are simply deluged by applications, so getting picked for even one is like winning the lottery. A couple of these over the years have gone my way, and it’s always gratifying, even when the only thing you get is the performance and maybe a recording or video, but my sense is that building one-on-one relationships with performers is a better way to go.

So this post: I’m going to put two lists here, and I might even decide to break radio silence on social media and share this post there: I have no idea if anyone ever looks at this blog besides me, and in some ways, I’ve felt for more than a decade that I’ve been shouting into the void with it.

If you’re interested in anything from either of these lists, use the contact form on my website.

List 1 is pieces that are ready to go, but that I think are underplayed, or which have not even had a premiere.

Orchestra: As we all know, getting performances of orchestral music is really darn hard, but if you’re looking for something, I probably have it for you.

  1. I happen to think 2015’s …into the suggestive waters… is a really good piece for small orchestra that audiences can really enjoy, if they have the chance to hear it. It’s only had one performance, but if you think you might want to change that, give it a listen.
  2. My 2014 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra has had two performances, and if you’re a pianist looking for an exciting 20-minute piece, look no further.
  3. If string orchestra is more your style, my three-movement Suite for String Orchestra from 2012 pays homage to three of my favorite compositional influences; it’s had a few performances, but it’s due for a revival, and can be done by as few as nine players.
  4. Gamer Troll Loses Control had a good premiere in 2021, and is the same instrumentation as Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. About nine minutes long, it is a tone poem based on an original fairy-tale.

Band/Large Wind Ensemble: Once upon a time, I was actually afraid to be “just” a band composer, and I knew I was wrong to feel that way. Here are a few gems:

  1. One of my relatively few works from 2020, Majestic Fanfare is for symphonic brass ensemble. The commissioning group, Ohio Valley Majestic Brass, played it around in 2021-2022, but because of the nature of their gigs, I didn’t get a recording to share.
  2. The last work I had premiered pre-pandemic was Mysterious Marvels for concert band (one cancelled performance was never rescheduled). It’s had one performance, and is ripe for more (it’s probably a grade 4.5 or 5).
  3. I’ve played the solo part in 2005’s Homo sapiens trombonensis twice, and I’d love to see another trombonist pick it up. The solo part is for an advanced player (but not as hard as the Creston Fantasy), and the band part is probably a grade 5.

Choral and Vocal Music: I have two a cappella choral pieces from the last few years.

  1. Christmas Eve from 2021 had a great set of premiere performances by Choral Spectrum that year. It’s about 3 minutes long, for SATB with a few divisi, as you can see in the score-follow video that I’ve linked.
  2. A piece that is currently orphaned is my setting of Yeats’ Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven from 2019. Some choirs have expressed interest, but no luck yet. It’s about five minutes, for SSAATTBB.
  3. And I Live With the Fiction That I Never Get Mad, for baritone and piano, is a long standalone song that had a premiere in 2019. I’m particularly proud of my approach in this piece, and if a baritone is looking for repertoire that addresses the impact that media can have on our lives, this might be for you.

Chamber and Solo Music: The most orphans live here, I suppose, along with a few pieces that need a second hearing.

  1. Child’s Play from 2020 for bass clarinet duo needs a premiere. It’s about 10 minutes long, uses a few multiphonics, and is inspired by the short story of the same name by Alice Munro. I’d be up to rework this piece for another instrumentation if there’s interest.
  2. Gamer Troll Loses Control (also listed in Orchestra) had a good premiere in 2021, and is the same instrumentation as Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. About nine minutes long, it’s a tone poem based on an original fairy-tale, itself based on children’s artwork.
  3. Duo Capriccio is a set of variations on *that* theme by Paganini for flute and clarinet, if you need something to give variety to your recital. It had a premiere in South Dakota in 2018, and I think it should go out there again.
  4. Autumn Fantasy from 2016, eight minutes in one movement for alto clarinet and piano, is another orphan of the collaborative process that has never had a premiere as far as I know. I’d be up for reworking this for bass clarinet, or English horn, or some other woodwind.
  5. Meditation for cello and piano is a ten-minute, one movement piece from 2015 that had a great premiere, but needs to get out there more: it’s one of my favorites from the 2010s, and is inspired by the writings of Marcus Aurelius.
  6. One more orphan is my 2009 Piano Trio, which had a reading session, so I have a good recording, but never a public premiere, and I think the piece deserves one. It’s about 8 minutes in one movement.

I have many more pieces for solo piano and other solo instruments with and without piano, ranging in difficulty from fairly short and simple to college-recital or professional level. Why not go check out my Works List and see what might be there for you!

List 2 is pieces that I’ve been thinking about or dreaming about, often for decades… if you’ve ever been interested in playing my music, but wondered when I’d get around to writing for your instrument or ensemble, now is probably a great time to reach out.

  1. Music for worship. My faith is an important part of my life, but I don’t always get the chance to combine it with my compositional work. I’m not talking about contemporary Christian music here: that stuff is fine, but it’s not my bag. Let me write for your choir, organist, brass ensemble, soloists, or some combination. Anything from an offertory to a full cantata is something I’d be up to discuss.
  2. String quartet. I wrote a student piece string quartet based on some favorite children’s books back in 2006, but I’d love the chance to do something more serious and extended for the ensemble.
  3. Choral and vocal music. Yes, please! If you have poetry that you want set, or if you are a poet, or you just want a new piece for you or your chorus, reach out. I haven’t had enough chances to write for voices, but I love to do it when I can.
  4. Trombone ensemble. How have I not written for trombone quartet or octet or choir before?
  5. Band or orchestra music. Definitely something that I won’t write (usually) without a guarantee of a performance, even though I love to do it: it’s just too much work otherwise. It would be cool to take another crack at creating a silent film score like I did in 2013 for Georges Melies’ Voyage Dans La Lune. Really big bucket list piece: I have half of a forty-minute symphony written based on the chorale tune Old Hundredth (the Doxology in many churches).
  6. Similar vein: fanfares! So much fun to write, and so exciting to put together, and I love pushing the idea of what a festive, bright, piece can be. Let me write your concert opener!
  7. Percussion music. I’m tired of being intimidated by the cool kids in the back of the room. I want to tackle percussion ensemble, but I want to do it as a collaboration with players who will guide me through the process.
  8. I’d love to collaborate on more dance projects. I’ve conducted for ballet, and had one of my works, Martian Dances, form the basis for some beautiful choreography. I’m a terrible dancer, but I can provide a good beat.
  9. I’m often inspired by science, especially space. Let’s write a cool piece about the Universe, or nature, or the human brain, or DNA. What are you into?
  10. I’m always game to write more piano music. Piano was my first instrument, although never my best. I’d love to write a second piano sonata, or a suite of pieces based on Lake Erie and its shoreline here in Northeast Ohio, or something inspired by whatever inspires you!
  11. Solo instrument with piano. There are a few standard instruments in this combination that I’ve never tackled, and I’d be up for that, plus I’d be happy to return to any that I’ve already done. What about: viola, euphonium, double-bass, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, saxophone, English horn?
  12. Any sort of ongoing project that results in multiple pieces and performances. I don’t know–hit me up! Multimedia isn’t really my thing, but I’m happy to collaborate with non-musicians.
  13. Whatever chamber ensemble you’re a part of, no matter how weird. I’m always happy to help build someone’s repertoire!

So… this took longer than I expected, but maybe something will come of it, and if you don’t work with me for whatever reason, find another living composer and work with them! It’s good for our art form!

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Back to Severance After Three Years

January 6th, 2023

In February 2020, I went to see the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall. I expected to go again in May 2020, but we know what happened there.

Somehow, I skipped the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 seasons completely, making me officially out of the habit. The first year was certainly out of good sense: I wasn’t eligible for a COVID vaccine until mid-2021, and wasn’t really teaching much in person until Fall 2021: I’m still not back in the classroom as much as I was in Fall 2019, and wouldn’t be surprised if I never am. As well, Becky has been back at work, and scheduling a concert for just myself has been tricky: we don’t refer to taking care of our own kids as “babysitting,” but solo parenting for optional reasons is not something we like to stick each other with if we don’t have to.

The kids and I drove all the way to Cincinnati in June to hear the Cincinnati Symphony perform my Florence Price arrangement, but otherwise, I haven’t been to many things that I wasn’t specifically involved in putting on.

So, last night, I ended the drought, and went to hear the Cleveland Orchestra perform works by James Oliverio, Haydn, and Nielsen, under the baton of Alan Gilbert. Here’s the program.

Gilbert has been on my list of conductors to see since he took over the New York Philharmonic in 2009. My impression last night was that he is certainly charming and personable, with real “music director” energy that seems to invite musicians and audiences to trust him. His approach to the last movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 90, with its multiple false endings, had the audience in more laughter than I think I’ve ever heard at a symphony concert, and he successfully enlisted new concertmaster David Radzynski as accomplice (this was also my first chance to see Radzynski, whose father was on my doctoral committee, in action in the front chair). Coming from the band world, I think I tend to appreciate economy of gesture in a conductor, and this was a part of Gilbert’s approach in a way, but I don’t think in a useful way. The danger with a group such as Cleveland is that they will play the conductor, and I’m not convinced this wasn’t evident last night. I really only noticed one sort of beat from the right hand, which I would characterize as overly staccato, and the left hand seemed to mirror much of the time. Gilbert prefers a grip on the baton that I would find awkward, pointing and jabbing rather than amplifying and clarifying. The “gravitational” beat that I consider to be crucial was lost–and in one of the hammerblows that begin the Nielsen Third Symphony, the result was sloppiness of ensemble rare among Cleveland Orchestra performances.

I met James Oliverio once in graduate school when he came to Columbus for a performance of his first timpani concerto: it must have been 2005 or 2006. I don’t remember going to the performance, only being present for his masterclass, but I remember his affable, easygoing manner, shooting straight with young composers and percussionists, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he now holds an academic position. That good-naturedness was on full display in the pre-concert talk in an interview by Dr. Emily Laurance. It was also present in Oliverio’s new timpani concerto, Legacy Ascendant, with the solo part taken by Cleveland Orchestra principal timpanist Paul Yancich. Oliverio and Yancich have a decades-long collaboration stemming from their student years at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Legacy Ascendant is a work with a fair amount of heft, and solves the problem of how to make a concerto for timpani in interesting ways. Yancich’s ability to retune the drums (seven of them) between strokes is impressive, and his phrasing allows the instrument to sing, despite the same problems that the piano or the guitar have with the sustain that we expect from a truly lyrical line. One method Oliverio uses for this is to use the cello and bass sections as resonators that hold a note after the timpanist plays it: this works well in slow-to-medium tempo passages, but he wisely avoids it for faster notes. I didn’t feel enough contrast between the three movements, and the promised “groove” in the last movement never seemed to materialize.

The Haydn, and Gilbert’s approach to it, were a pleasant surprise, and the core members of the orchestra played spectacularly in a piece the orchestra last played in 1967. I don’t generally seek out performances of the Classical repertoire when I select Cleveland Orchestra concerts, but I’m always impressed with the results when I happen to hear them.

The main event (at least to me) was Nielsen’s Third Symphony. I discovered this piece on CD in the summer of 1996, when I spent a lot of time listening through my collection, which by that point included Neeme Jarvi’s recording of Nielsen’s symphonies with Gothenberg. I was especially charmed by the Third, with its opening movement, and got as far as checking out the score from the CCM library, where I discovered to my delight that Nielsen indicated that the baritone solo could be performed on trombone and the soprano solo on clarinet (I have to wonder if the piece has ever actually been performed this way). In relistening to the piece and studying the score over the last couple of days, I hear the musical challenges: the long-breathed formal sections, the orchestration that is sometimes too heavy, and a certain harmonic ambiguity. But: it has been a piece I’ve wanted to hear in person for a long time, so I bookmarked this concert.

Gilbert and the Orchestra returned a very solid performance (despite a mishap here and there). The piece rewards the kind of ensemble playing that the Cleveland Orchestra makes a specialty of, while also giving ample opportunities to the principal players. As much as I’ve always loved the first movement, it was the third movement that really shone last night. It’s not quite a scherzo, and Dr. Laurence suggested similarities to Shostakovich, which may be a little premature, but I certainly hear Janacek and Bartok waiting in the wings. A great night for flutist Jessica Sindell, filling in the principal chair.

I’m on the lookout for a concert that will feature recently-appointed principal trombonist Brian Wendel. Of course, Ravel’s Bolero is coming up next month, but as important as that solo is for trombonists, it’s one among the crowd in the work itself. Mozart’s Requiem is on the way, but it’s solo is in the second trombone part, so I wouldn’t expect the principal to play it.

Severance Hall seems to be back to its old self. One disappointment is that, while the autograph manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony is on display, it is largely obscured within a box that projects video in front of it, which is somewhat confusing. Last night it was open to a page from the Scherzo with no explanation.

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Social Media Thoughts

December 15th, 2022

Now that I have a working blog again, I might as well contribute to it.

Really, I’m surprised I haven’t been here more, since I’ve fallen away from social media almost completely. I mostly gave up the Time-Zuck (you know, Zuckerbook) several years ago because I got more interested in the Bird Site, and from about 2016 to 2021, it became a raging habit, even if I didn’t have a blue checkmark. At New Years 2021, the Bean Dad thing went down, and that really bothered me: I was a fan of one of that guy’s podcasts with a certain gameshow host. It reminded me of the old Car Talk show on NPR in a lot of good ways: just friendly, good-natured guys talking about interesting stuff. I was picking up lunch for my family at the drive-through, and scrolling through the sudden vitriol pointed at the guy, just agape. I haven’t listened to that podcast since, but I also decided to take a break from the Bird. That break lasted about five months, when, still pretty COVID-isolated, I got into it again for the rest of 2021. I felt duped, so I decided to go on Bird hiatus again around Christmas 2021, and this time it has more or less stuck, with a check-in or two. The last time I checked in was just as a certain billionaire was purchasing the site, and the panic among my contacts there sort of led me to believe that being off was probably for the best, so: app deleted. My first follow and follower there, and former teacher and now colleague, Wes Flinn, said he was thinking about getting his blog life going again (go check out his blog), and that may indeed be a good idea. At the very least, more intentional than everyone’s formerly favorite microblogging site.

And to both of the tech billionaires to whose sites I have given massive amounts of time, effort, and probably my soul to, I say, “I want my 2010s back.”

I don’t know what my life would have looked like since 2007 without social media: when it exploded in the late ’00s, I was teaching in rural Oklahoma without access to much of a classical music scene, to say nothing of a new music scene. Late in my graduate work, my advisor Don Harris told me that he was fairly sure I would keep composing, unlike some of his former students, but I’m not so sure how that would have gone without the connections I remade on Zuckerbook between 2008 and 2010. I got back in touch with a lot of people from my stints at Ohio State and Cincinnati. In some cases, they were people I hadn’t talked to in over a decade. A few of them commissioned me, a couple of others performed my music, and one, Dianna Anderson, did both. That site connected me to the outside world in a way that email and surfing the Net wouldn’t have, I think. I’ve often said that I have a composition career because of Zuckerbook, and I don’t really think that’s untrue. I’m lousy at keeping in touch.

I wasn’t able to replicate that on the Bird site. I would follow people, they would follow me. One musician reached out to me, and a piece resulted, but my DMs pointed in the opposite direction never really bore fruit. I don’t know if everyone was too busy talking past each other, or what. But, honestly, in my conductor persona, I can rarely do much for a composer who contacts me, whether they have a piece in hand or not: it usually isn’t a matter of whether I like their music or would want to work with them, but rather a case of just only having so many slots for new music in the season.

Speaking of keeping in touch, I’ve definitely been in touch with my relatives more, although not my parents, who saw social media for the steaming load of nothing that it is from the very beginning: I still have to call my parents. A few of them I discovered that I really wish I was able to have a deeper relationship with in person.

But a thing that was fun quickly became a thing I felt obligated to look at, and then it became something I just did without thinking about. We got smartphones in 2015 or so, and then I could sit on the couch with Becky in the evenings as we do and scroll through the social feed. I added the Bird site in 2016 when Noah’s first grade teacher said she’d be using it (spoiler: she had moved on to another app and didn’t use it once the whole year). But I was there through the 2016 election and everything that resulted from that, and the cool thing about the Bird site was that I was sort of in the bubble of musicologists, music theorists, and academic composers, for what it was worth, all trading pithy little lines and feeling more collective outrage than I can ever remember experiencing, all without the noise of the perpetual high school reunion of Zuckerbook.

And I told them so much… stuff just put out there for the public to see. My kids’ early lives are largely documented on Becky’s Zuckerbook account, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Most of my 30s and early 40s are on Zuckerbook and the Bird. I became middle-aged on social media (disclosure: my mother says I’ve been middle-aged since preschool). I don’t know if my history is a motherlode for some data mining bot, but it’s there, ready to be used to shape my consumer preferences or to try to influence my vote, or train facial-recognition AI. I don’t know why someone as paranoid as I am about being watched even got pulled into it as fully as I did (I joined Zuckerbook in 2007 because a commissioning ensemble wanted to be able to connect me to their members during the composing process). It was all fun and cool and interesting and titillating… until it wasn’t.

We’ve all been there, probably. I remember the moment I really started to think that TV wasn’t worth my time anymore. I was cleaning up at the end of art class in eighth grade, in 1989 or 1990, and I wound up standing at the sink next to a girl I had a crush on. I asked her if she had seen Friday’s episode of Family Matters, and she sneered and replied, “Why would I watch that crap?” I didn’t quit watching TV, but I started to feel a little more jealous of the time I was spending with it, just in time for high school, when more interesting things were starting to make demands of me anyway. For a few years as an adult, I lived alone and didn’t have a TV. On a rare visit, my brother noticed and said, “Oh, you must get a lot done.”

I loved email when I first got online. I didn’t really know that there was much more to the internet than that when I got started. The time my friends and I spent writing serial epic adventure stories parodying everyone we knew was precious, and we still talk about it when we get together: but it was also time I could have been in the practice room, or socializing in real life, or exploring the city. At one point, I got onto Trombone-L, a listserv, and would spend hours each evening engaging in the world of the trombone with–who? I have to say I can’t even remember.

So social media isn’t my first rodeo with overconsumption of screen-based stuff. And there may be something about the screen. My trombone teacher in middle school once told me that, growing up in the 1940s, he was never all that interested in radio, but that he found television’s pull extremely difficult to resist when it came along. At the very least, I’m not the only one (isn’t that what the great lesson of the Internet has been: whatever our interest or neurosis or kink or secret obsession is… we’re not the only one).

One of the social media projects that I’m proudest of was the Cleveland Composers Guild Piece of the Day. From March 2020 to March 2022, I scoured the websites and social media accounts of our members and found a different piece to post each day to the Guild feeds. I even helped some members get pieces out there that weren’t posted anywhere else. It kept the music coming from our group when we were somewhat limited in what we could do live. I’ve only gotten thank yous and positive feedback about it.

My experience of Piece of the Day was different, though. During lockdown, when I had time on my hands, it was something to do. Listening to people’s music was a way of staying connected to the world of new music. That progressed through most of 2020 and 2021, when I was primarily working from home. Eventually, I made a spreadsheet, and realized that a daily appointment to find a piece and post it wasn’t always possible, so I would work ahead. Making daily posts turned into a weekly moment to pre-load and schedule the posts. By the end of 2021, I wasn’t even taking the time to listen to the pieces I was highlighting–I just needed to stay ahead of my last post so I didn’t have to worry about breaking the chain. It was a grind, and it was a discipline. And the number of likes and comments and the rest were usually pretty small, vanishingly so. As much as it was a part of my routine, it had become just so much noise and shouting into the void. So, after talking to my fellow officers, I ended Piece of the Day. Everyone was effusive in their gratitude, but now, most of a year later, no one has really said that they miss it.

And so much of social media–especially the Bird site the last couple of years–has felt like shouting into the void (as much as this blog is, too, so there, Web 2.0!). I can’t even remember the last time I looked at Zuckerbook in any kind of serious way. Oh, once in a while I’ll follow a link there or get pulled in by an email about someone making a post, but it’s more satisfying to live my life IRL, even if it makes my world seem smaller.

Because of all that time! What could I have done with all that time I gave those two sites? How could I have been a better husband, father, Christian, composer, conductor, teacher? I’ve become fatter, tired-er, and worse at trombone. Can I really blame social media for that? I don’t know, but it didn’t help. What could I have done with all that time? What could all that mental energy and attention given to the people in the tiny glass rectangle–most of whom I’ve never met, will never meet, or haven’t talked to in twenty years–where would I be without it?

I suppose my job in the rest of the 2020s is to live out the answer to that question. I may have lost the 2010s to a couple of billionaires, but it doesn’t have to keep being that way.

Posted in Personal Reflections | Comments Closed

Back with Beowulf

October 9th, 2022

A few weeks back, I had an exchange with my Lakeland colleague Natalie Hopper after reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf over the summer. I immediately thought, “hey, this would make a good blog post,” after not posting anything since March. So I jumped over to the old website, and quickly discovered that there was A Problem, and I was unable to log in. Fast forward eight crazy weeks of teaching and parenting, and I was able to get things worked out with my hosting service, so now I give you my take on Beowulf, translation, transcription, and arranging.

In music, we have something similar to translation, namely arranging or transcribing music originally for one ensemble to be playable by a different ensemble, say, taking a piece written for organ and turning into something for concert band. It’s been done throughout the ages, by just about everyone: Bach reworked his own music, along with music by people like Vivaldi, into new combinations, and Beethoven actually paid a good number of his bills during the economic inflation of the Napoleonic Wars with arrangements of all sorts of folksongs. If you’re learning to orchestrate, making arrangements and transcriptions is a time-honored way of doing it. Some of the first orchestra music I ever had performed was an assignment for an undergraduate class to arrange a Bach keyboard fugue for the students we had available in the class.

I actually came to composition through arranging and transcribing other people’s music, mostly for the students I was teaching when I was a K-12 teacher… the list of composers I’ve arranged is long and distinguished, and includes the Gypsy Kings, K.C. and JoJo, the Beatles, Bach (of course), the Moody Blues, Dave Brubeck, Debussy, Schubert. I lived in Macon, Georgia for a while, and I knew the personnel manager with the Macon Symphony Orchestra, which led to doing some arranging for them, including a whole evening of Otis Redding songs for rock band and orchestra, with Otis Redding’s grandson as the vocalist. That one paid for Becky’s and my honeymoon. By that point, I had also started composing: it isn’t a big stretch from having to come up with an intro, an outro, or a transition, to writing a piece “based on” an existing tune, to just writing a whole new “freely composed” piece. 

I completely get Heaney’s moment of discovering one little nugget and then working out the rest: that’s pretty much my experience much of the time. “Oh, this line would be great for clarinet,” or “I can hear this combination here in the accompaniment.” Then, there’s a certain about of just workmanship that happens, what my dad’s woodcarving teacher used to call “moving wood.” Inevitably, there are the places where things don’t quite line up, and you have to get clever and creative. Music notation software makes the process so much more bearable… I don’t think I would be a composer if I had to do everything by hand.

I guess another equivalent in writing would be rehashing old stories. I took a creative writing course in college, and the prof had us take one of the stories we admired from our anthology and type a few pages into the computer just to see how it looked… many of my classmates realized that their writing was far too small compared to that year’s Best American Short Stories (especially the frat boy who wrote a four-page ripoff of Reservoir Dogs). He also had us attempt a style copy: mine was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We were on quarters, so all this, plus writing our stories, plus critiquing our classmates’ work fit into 10 weeks!

I had a big arranging moment this summer: The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed my arrangement of Florence Price’s Adoration, which was originally for organ. This is the composer equivalent to starting for the Guardians (having an original work performed by them would be like starting for the Yankees or Red Sox). At any rate, it’s The Show. A conductor I’ve worked with (as arranger and composer) hired me to create two versions of the piece during the lockdown: one for ten musicians, and another for small orchestra. Then, he was named the Cincinnati Symphony’s diversity fellow, and he called me up for a third, new arrangement, “worthy of the Cincinnati Symphony.” I was able to write for a larger orchestra (really, I could have gone as big as I wanted, but I fit my requirements to the other music on the concert) and also write with a full-time professional group in mind. It was actually quite a lot of pressure to make sure absolutely everything was right—there’s no time to figure out how to fix something that isn’t working, because rehearsal on this relatively simple piece consisted of a couple of run-throughs in the two days before the concert: that’s all they needed, and their time is collectively worth about $1000 a minute. This is an extremely savvy group who has played everything​ worth playing, along with tons of arrangements for pops concerts: they would know immediately if I had screwed up or if I was worth their time, and not just by the sound, but by the look of the printed parts I was providing. So that’s how I spent my Spring Break last year.

In June, the kids and I drove down to Cincinnati to hear the thing: because of copyright laws and union rules, I wouldn’t be getting a copy of the recording (this annoys the crap out of composers, but it’s for everyone’s own good). So we had to be there, and they did comp our tickets. This wasn’t a subscription concert—it was at a great big megachurch in the suburbs as part of the orchestra’s community outreach program. The results of my work and the CSO’s playing were splendid: all the effects I had hoped for were there, and they all made sense, and I think I did justice to the composer’s intentions (Florence Price’s story is heartbreaking, as shouldn’t be a surprise for an African-American woman who died in the 1950s). My kids were amazed, and they proceeded to tell everyone around us that I was behind that music. Overall a good weekend. Since then, I’ve sold that sheet music three times, which is selling like hotcakes for me, to orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Mankato, Minnesota—another conductor has picked up the piece and programmed it this fall, and I hope Antoine finds space to use it again.

I went to college at the University of Cincinnati, and my trombone teacher was the principal trombonist for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (he’s long-retired now). I’ve probably heard that orchestra in concert more times than any other, so their sound and their approach is basically what I hear when I compose or play trombone. It awes me to think that something I arranged is now in their library, waiting for the next time they need it. I haven’t seen my royalty statement for it yet, but I think it will probably be a chunk…

So, I guess I’m back now.

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Posted in Composing | Comments Closed

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