Archive for October, 2010

Why My Son Will Never Play Football

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

This is an elaboration of a statement I have made to a few people now and again, and a few more since Noah was born.  I hope it doesn’t amount to heresy in too many people’s minds, but since becoming a father, I feel all the more strongly about it.  My son, Noah, will not be playing football, at least not in any sort of organized way.  Please don’t think him a coward or less of a man–it simply isn’t his choice.  If Becky and I have more children, they won’t be playing football, either.

As a band member, and later as a high school and college band director, I have seen more football games than I might otherwise have chosen to see.   I’ve been told that you never really understand the game until you’ve played it, and while I’ve played in pickup games, mostly touch or flag, I can’t really say that I’ve played football.  Not in the way that some men mean when they talk about their football experiences.

I’ve watched, though.  And I watch Ohio State play football, not out of a great love of the game, or out of genuine affection for Ohio State, but because it’s a link to my hometown, and sometimes they show places that I’ve been during the coverage, and it was the Ohio State marching band that first inspired me to be a trombonist in any serious way.  I haven’t been to an Ohio State football game since 1987, and I’ve never paid for a ticket–I was an usher with the Boy Scouts back then.  Ohio State football reminds me of home, and I live a long way from there.

I don’t know what my parents woudl have said if my brother and I wanted to play.  We certainly weren’t encouraged to play or to try out, and until that season ushering at Ohio State, my parents only ever took us to a few games, always Homecoming at Wittenberg University, my father’s alma mater.  When I was in first grade, I remember Wittenberg beating Marietta 65-3.  I don’t know what the response to a yearning desire to play football would have been; my brother and I both had other interests, and we were pushed toward Boy Scouts  by my father, who was the best scoutmaster I ever saw.

Noah will not play football because of the almost certain chance that he will be injured either in practice or in the game.  In particular, the chance of brain injury–almost too certain to call it a chance–is what really damns the sport in my book.  One person I’ve discussed this with recently objected that helmets keep getting better and better.  However, a helmet may protect the skull from direct trauma, but it does little for the brain, floating serenely in the cranium until subjected to the sudden acceleration that can cause concussion, or worse.

Just what does a concussion mean to a young man of football age?  The teens are a time when the brain is developing rapidly, but in an odd way–the unused synapses are being closed down, and trauma to the brain at that age accelerates this process.  All humans undergo this pruning of neural pathways, but if too few remain, it can become difficult if not impossible to learn later in life.  The results of repeated concussions are rapidly becoming clear–greater risk of depression, suicide, and propensity for substance abuse, violent behavior, along with diminished capacity to adapt to a changing and challenging world.

While none of these prospects is good, this last is probably the most concerning.  In the 1940s, perhaps it was the case that a young man who suffered a concussion or two would be just fine.  The economy was based on manufacturing and agriculture to a far greater extent than today.  A person of less-than-perfect mental ability could still find a job that would allow him to support a family in a middle-class lifestyle and possibly even retire comfortably courtesy of strong unions, Social Security and a booming American economy.  The work was relatively simple, repetitive and unchanging.  A high school diploma was enough.

Today, though, a college degree is the new high school diploma.  By the time Noah graduates high school in 2028, it is difficult to imagine that a master’s degree will not be necessary for most desirable jobs.  The repetitive, simple job that provides a middle-class existence has been gone for decades, of course, and the truth is that Noah will need every brain cell he can muster to be competitive in a world in which competition is global, intense and technologically driven.  To allow him to participate in an activity, namely football, that is predicated on deliberately striking another human being as hard as physically possible, and being so struck oneself, is, to my thinking, the epitome of child abuse.

Here in Oklahoma, and in much of the rest of the country, high school football is a religion, and what I’m saying is heresy.  Many of my colleagues, neighbors and students regard their time playing high school football as golden, and eagerly anticipate the day that their sons can put on helmet and shoulder pads.  Around here, community leagues begin in elementary school, as was true in my hometown.  Even if I had wanted to play football in middle school, I would have been outclassed by my peers who had played years of UA Grid Kid football.  What I’m about to say next will anger football lovers even more:

Football must to be banned if the United States is to compete in the 21st century world.

It is no secret that the growing economies, especially China and India, will soon surpass America in nearly every category, at least those in which they have not bested us already.  Like Noah, we will need every brain cell we can lay our hands on to be creative, intelligent and tenacious rather than lethargic, beaten-down or worse.  We simply cannot sacrifice a generation of our young men in the name of a game.

Maybe an outright ban isn’t necessary.  Government can apply a variety of tools to influence behavior.  Perhaps denying federal funding to schools who continue to sponsor football teams is the answer.  Perhaps a punitive tax on football equipment that would fund the social services required by the victims of concussions and their families.  Perhaps a switch to flag football is the answer–an option suggested derisively by one commentator not long ago on national television in response to what he perceived as an overly “safe” call.

Why do we as a society continue to promote this sort of institutionalized violence?  As a male, I understand the occasional desire to “knock heads”–I have as much testosterone as the next man.  However, if our society isn’t based on the need to subvert those urges, then upon what is it founded?  Are we really in need of this kind of ritualized warfare?  Are there not more civilized forms of competition just as intense?

Football undoubtedly has benefits for some young men.  As with all opportunities for young men to interact with wiser, older men, football allows lives to be changed for the better when a boy who hasn’t had a fair shake encounters men of character.  At the same time, though, does the number of injuries and deaths in high school football really justify this?  Are there not other chances for young men to encouter the men who will become their mentors and shape them?  Wouldn’t a few less traumatically-brain-damaged men be better able to provide this for some boys who don’t currently get it, whether their sons or someone else’s?

Similarly, the argument that football teaches persistence and otherwise “builds character” is technically true, at least for the young men who don’t get cut from the team or have to quit because of injury.  But any endeavor worth pursuing and well-persued can teach persistence.  I learned it from music, while my brother learned it working on the school newspaper.  We also both had a serious dose of it from Scouting and from running our newspaper delivery route (a small business, really).  Any activity worth pursuing can teach character and persistence, and possibly without brain-damage an indoctrination of violence.

Perhaps football teaches strategy and tactics.  Again, this may be true.  It was said that Wellington’s victory at Waterloo was born on the ball fields of Eton and Cambridge.  I am not such an idealist to believe that our country will not one day need to again demonstrate military prowess in the fundamental sort of way that football would seem to simulate on a weekly basis.  However, I would submit that the boon Wellington and his officers actually got from playing together was not strategic in nature, but rather more to do with command and control, as a 19th-century officer could not immediately know his commander’s wishes in the heat of battle.  It was through their personal knowledge of Wellington’s style that his former classmates were able to intuit his intentions.  We have the equivalent in the United States, namely in the cadres of officers graduated each year from West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy.  Football has little to do with it.  The best way to study strategy and tactics is to actually study strategy and tactics, then engage in the most realistic simulations of warfare as possible, not to participate in a game requiring you to knock helmets deliberately with the very people who you will one day depend on as you fight alongside them.

People who know me consider me to be serious (although people who really know me know that I have a lighter side, too).  I see nothing wrong with throwing the flag, as it were, on a dangerous activity, and I can only hope that people will read this and understand when Noah doesn’t suit up sometime around 2022 or so.  I hope to do as my parents did and present him with other opportunities to build his character, first and foremost providing him with an example, as did my father.  I will understand if people my age (and younger, as I’m a little old to be a first-tiem father) continue to let their sons play, but please respect my decision, and don’t try to convince Noah that he needs to play football.

Mahler, Symphony No. 8, movement 1

Monday, October 4th, 2010

I was afraid that I would arrive at this piece and it would be absolutely overwhelming, but that hasn’t been the case.  Not in the slightest.  The problem I’m having is that I just don’t like what I’m hearing very much.

I don’t think this is Mahler’s best effort.  Perhaps in writing a “Symphony of a Thousand,” he had to paint with broad brushstrokes:  too broad, if you ask me.  I hadn’t listened to this piece seriously in a very long time–at least fifteen years, and I knew much less about how to listen then than I do now.  Plus, I think every college-aged brass player has to get excited about Mahler–any Mahler–just because it’s orchestral music that doesn’t involve counting quite as many rests.  Let’s face it–Mahler was good to the brass section in a way that some other composers weren’t (although plenty were).  So in my testosterone-fueled, late-teenage years, this piece may have seemed like a little bit of heaven.  I have to admit, though, that there is a little bit of hell here, too.

One of the very exciting parts about studying Mahler has been getting to know his unique orchestration.  He may call for quadruple woodwinds, but it isn’t so that they can all play as loud as possible at the same time.  Rather, he mixes, blends and balances in a manner that could only be honed by a familiarity with the orchestra that I can only envy.  As a conductor, he must have been literally analyzing scores as he was on the podium during rehearsal, committing every effect to memory. 

Usually, this expertise shows through in the scores, but not here.  There are quadruple woodwinds, and a large brass section, but they almost continuously used en masse, and usually in the sort of mixed scoring that band directors often derisively call “safe scoring.”  Perhaps the simple truth is that the enormous choruses of the premiere required this, but it is disappointing in comparison to the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies.

This first movement is not without its merits, though.  Mahler may have ignored his genius for orchestration (or perhaps not, as the music does succeed in overwhelming the listener with sound, just not the analyst).  I can’t deny that, as art and as craft, this is an effective composition, just as is Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.  Like 1812, though, it is unrellenting in a way that is somewhat off-putting.  Both these pieces are great music, but they are great in the way that the Grand Canyon is great–their beauty and their appeal lies more in magnitude and sheer forcefulness than in greatness.

Just what is symphonic about this movement?  Is it possible for a piece that is virtually sung throughout to be a symphony?  Up to this time, Mahler had incorporated voices at the end of his symphonies–almost as though he had exhausted what instruments might have to say, just as Beethoven did in his Ninth, but here they appear from the beginning–from the second measure.  The singing is nearly unrellenting for over one hundred measures–the first major instrumental interlude comes at m. 122.  The material here–still fairly broadly scored–is related to the thematic material presented so far, and it is only 18 bars before the voices enter again.

I don’t understand the almost constant doubling of the voice parts–even the soloists–throughout this movement.  This was not Mahler’s approach in the Second Symphony, at least not to the extent we see it here.   I think perhaps that knowing the circumstances of the premiere–a festival setting with an enormous chorus–may have influenced his decision, and perhaps overly so.  Is it possible that, if Mahler had lived longer, he would have revised this work, as he did so many of his others?  Perhaps 1915 or 1916 would have seen a version scored with more reasonable forces in mind. 

There does seem to be a basic sonata principle at work here.  The instrumental interlude seems to suggest the beginning of a development section, and the harmonic pace of the movement quickens after m. 122.  At m. 169, following a deceptive cadence, a second instrumental interlude begins, this one lasting until m. 217 (significantly longer).  When the voices reenter, the music is in C# minor, and both key and text (which is recycled) continue to suggest the development of a sonata-allegro.

Beginning in m. 231, Mahler dwells on an important text:  Lumen accende sensibus–Kindle a light in our senses.  The Romantic yearning for a full feeling of existence is summed up in this line, and Mahler repeats the text several times, where he has mostly set the text much more plainly up until now.  It reappears in a massive climax in m. 262.

At the pickup to m. 275, the children’s chorus enters for the first time, and at a moment where it seems as though nothing else could make this music bigger, grander, this entrance makes it clear that there can be more.  The music now moves from C-sharp minor to E minor, and then to E-flat major, the home key.  This is not the final return, though, and the key changes again, by sequence, to A major in m. 355, and then to Db major just a few bars later.

A return of the accende lumen text leads back to the true return to the home key in measure 385.  Over the next twenty-eight bars the music builds to a truly titanic climax that is the recapitulation.  It appears over a dominant pedal that leads to a long frustration of the tonic chord–we have recaputulated melodically, but not harmonically, and there is no clear tonic chord in E-flat until m. 525.  At some point, there is a transition to coda material–the plagal-function harmonies in m. 564 confirm this–and a final push to an enormous last page.

On, then, to the second movement, the final scene of Faust.  And then to the piece in this set that I know the least, the Ninth.  After that, I have decided to send myself into some of the best works of the 1940s by several different composers.  I’m not certain yet precisely which pieces these will be, but I know that 2011 will see me in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata.

On the Road Again: Minneapolis and Rock Island

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

It’s been a crazy two weeks, with the bulk of it spent out of town, and too much of it spent away from my family, but it’s also good to get out and share insights and work with colleagues, and both of these trips allowed that.

First was the national conference of the College Music Society in Minneapolis.  I had never been to the Twin Cities before, and I didn’t see a great deal of Minneapolis, but what I saw I liked.  I was there to present a poster session on my research into rhythm–what I call quintuplous meters and their notation.  When I found out that I would be giving a poster of my research instead of a large-group presentation, I was a little disappointed, but in fact, I discovered that the poster format was perfect–instead of giving my talk to everyone at once, I could answer questions one-on-one, tailoring my approach to the individual person.  I probably had about as many one-to-one conversations standing there by my poster as there would have been people at my session, and I think everyone went away with their questions answered.

The other great part of the conference was the informal exchange of ideas.  I feel that I’ve spent mine and the university’s money well if I come away from a conference energized and ready to try something back home that I’ve learned about in a session or discussed with colleagues.  The persistent problem that kept coming up with my music theory and composition colleagues who teach at smaller schools is that more and more music majors arrive as freshmen needing the equivalent of what we call at OPSU “Fundamentals of Music.”  They simply are often not ready for Music Theory I.  At OPSU, we have been offering Music Fundamentals during the summer term, but most students who plan to take Theory I in the fall don’t end up taking Fundamentals in the summer first.  The ones who do are generally more successful in Theory I, and the one’s who don’t, but should hold the class back as I spend more time than is probably necessary “reviewing” (i.e., exposing students for the first time in many cases) scales, key signatures, triads and the notation of rhythm.  It turns out that we are not the only school with this problem, and I have brought the dialogue back to OPSU with the suggestion that all incoming music majors take Fundamentals of Music in the fall semester unless they can pass a test showing that they know the material.  Theory I would then be offered in the Spring, with Theory II as a mandatory summer class for all first-year music majors.  Still in the thinking stages, but with the vast array of subjects (ever-growing) that falls into the music theory sequence, I think students would be better for it.

I went to Minneapolis not really knowing anybody, although I expected to run into a few acquaintances.  Nolan Stolz had the poster next to mine, and it was good to finally meet him in person (and to get his feedback on my poster).  Alex Nohai-Seaman and I met through the Roommate Finder for the conference, and I am glad we did.  It was good to see Jason Bahr again, and to hear his choral piece performed on a stupendous concert.  I played a piece for Bonnie Miksch way back in my Cincinnati days, and it was nice to reconnect.  Jay Batzner gave excellent and insightful advice, and I want to learn more about being a human from him.  Rachel Ware had the poster behind mine, and I think our conversations in Minneapolis will lead to a collaboration down the road, so I’m very excited for that to happen.

Four days in Goodwell, then, and a drive to Garden City to catch the Amtrak, although not before having dinner with Jim McAllister, which is always a pleasure.  At this conference, the Society of Composers Region V Conference at Augustana College, I was able to room with an old friend, Dan Perttu.  As usual, some interesting music, some more difficult to listen to, played well by the Augustana students and faculty, along with invited guests.  The highlight for me was finally hearing a live performance of Starry Wanderers by Dianna Anderson.  Dianna was a master’s student at Cincinnati when I was there, and I was assigned to her studio for private piano lessons.  I wish I’d practiced more, because there was clearly much more for me to learn from her!  Her interpretation, as at the premiere that I missed last year, was the type that takes what I think is a pretty good piece and makes it better.  She brings it to life in a way that makes me proud to have written the piece.  On top of that, she is still the kind and down-to-earth person I remember from the mid-1990s.  If you have a chance to hear her play, do it.  If she is your teacher, learn well.

As always, it was good to see familiar faces, as well as a slew of new ones.  At my paper presentation on Saturday morning, I was thrilled to see flutist Kimberlee Goodman in the audience, whom I haven’t seen since we were at Ohio State.  Her performance of Jennifer Merkowitz’ Phyllotaxis was inspired, and since she asked me to send scores, I hope she can bring her talent to bear on my music in the near future.

A train ride home (I hope Amtrak finds my hat when the train gets to LA), and I’m back, but just as soon, Becky and Noah are off to see off her family at the Amarillo airport.  Perhaps this week, the Saunders’ will actually see some of each other…