Category: Analysis

Shake It To the Ground: SF Musicians Re-envision Classic(al) Career Paths

The San Francisco Bay Area has always been home to musicians who explore the boundaries of, and move freely between, genres and musical traditions. Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and Harry Partch all lived or worked here at some point in their lives, and the Kronos Quartet is based in San Francisco, to cite just a few prominent examples. Factor in the long history of activism and counterculture, and an atmosphere of openness and experimentation is simply an inherent part of the landscape.

Today, local enterprising young musicians continue to embrace this unique ethos. They inhabit a musical world almost totally free of the boundaries previously posed by genres and traditions, a world where contentious issues—formal attire, “alt-classical”—aren’t even issues anymore. They have sidestepped whole entire philosophical debates and simply decided to do what they wanted to do, which, of course, is what people in the Bay Area have been doing for a long time.

*

In a small rehearsal hall in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra sit in a semicircle facing Zach Rogue, front man of Bay Area bands Rogue Wave and Release the Sunbird. They have a performance the following night and are rehearsing string arrangements, written by Magik*Magik founder and director Minna Choi, that accompany Rogue’s songs. There’s an easy give-and-take between Rogue and Choi, and the rehearsal is relaxed. There is also a fair amount of arranging on the fly as the two search for the right sound or texture. The young Magik*Magik string players–everyone taking part in this session is a current or former student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music–scribble changes into their parts without missing a beat.

Choi’s arrangements go way beyond simple, sustained, chordal accompaniments. She is skilled at creating unique textures and is not afraid to explore extended techniques. One of the rehearsal’s more light-hearted moments comes when a violist loses a guitar pick inside the body of his instrument during an arrangement that calls for extended strumming, and spends the next few minutes trying to extricate it. This leads to a brief brainstorming session on the topic of pick tethers and how they might be used to prevent further mishaps.

Throughout the entire rehearsal it is clear that Rogue is enjoying this process, though at one point after a particularly emotional section he asks, “Do you think it’s too over the top?”, to which Choi replies emphatically, “No, no, no!” At the end of the night Rogue tells the Magik*Magik players that this is his first time working with musicians who can read music, which is not at all unusual for the members of this orchestra to hear.

Zach Rogue and Minna Choi, far right, rehearsing with members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra.

Zach Rogue and Minna Choi, far right, rehearsing with members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra.
The Magik*Magik Orchestra almost always works with other groups: singer/songwriters, rock bands, and anyone else who wants to add a bass clarinet, choir, or full orchestra to their album or live show. Choi, who founded the Magik*Magik Orchestra in 2008 while a graduate composition student at the San Francisco Conservatory, contracts the musicians from a roster of over 45 Magik*Magik players and writes the arrangements. Clients can record at Tiny Telephone studios, where the group is orchestra-in-residence. It’s one-stop shopping for bands looking to add an orchestral element to their sound.

Being in constant contact with such a diverse group of musicians, and by extension their audiences, has put Magik*Magik in a unique position to reach out to listeners who wouldn’t normally attend an orchestral concert. This has always been a goal, says Magik*Magik’s manager and clarinetist Annie Phillips. “Magik’s mission is to attract new listeners and participants to the orchestral experience,” she says. Educational programs are a big part of this strategy, and Magik*Magik runs an instrument petting zoo for kids at multiple San Francisco museums. At the Stern Grove Music Festival this summer they created a program called Build a Band, in which youngsters were able to build their own guitars and rattles from household items. Build a Band culminated with a group performance of a song by the San Francisco band The Dodos, complete with choreography, putting a Magik*Magik spin on the event.

Their outreach is not limited to kids, however. At a show in June with singer/songwriter John Vanderslice, Phillips manned the same instrument petting zoo in the lobby of San Francisco’s Herbst Theater. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! I’m bringing this to adults. I’m just going to be standing there by myself in the lobby.’ But it was really popular. All these people were coming up and trying all the instruments, and it’s cool because . . . they’ve never seen an orchestra back up a rock act before and then in the lobby there are all these instruments that are kind of weird-looking but they can try them out. We have a trombone, so all these people were playing the trombone in the lobby of Herbst.”

In addition to continuing their collaborative work, Choi and Phillips are also thinking about expanding their repertoire and presenting stand-alone Magik*Magik shows. “We’re starting to think about and plan: If we were to do just a season of Magik concerts, what would it be like?”, she says. “Minna and I have started to talk about non-work-for-hire things, like educational programs. We’re not really sure at this point, mostly because it works really well when we collaborate with other musicians.”

It does work well. The Magik*Magik orchestra has addressed a serious need in the San Francisco music scene and has either performed or recorded over seventy times since their inception. Plus, with each gig bringing new repertoire and excited, appreciative collaborators, why rush to change?

The inter-genre limbo inhabited by Magik*Magik is familiar and comfortable territory for composer Ryan Brown. Brown, together with fellow San Francisco musicians Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, created a festival based on the idea. Their annual Switchboard Music Festival, founded in 2007, focuses on Bay Area musicians whose work “falls in the cracks between genres,” and has featured everything from jazz and gamelan ensembles to a heavy metal-influenced bass clarinet quartet. Brown says that he and his colleagues mainly just book groups that they’re interested in hearing, rather than actively promoting a cross-genre sensibility. He sees this not only as a characteristic of the San Francisco scene–welcoming to all comers–but representative of his generation of classically trained musicians. “It’s not just a Bay Area thing, but also a generational thing –being a generation that got into classical music at a time when a lot of those battles had already been fought. A lot of the battles over whether rock is a legitimate music, or jazz, and whether it’s legitimate to incorporate them into your music.”

Guitarist Travis Andrews expresses a similar sentiment. Andrews is a member, along with percussionist Andrew Meyerson, of the guitar/percussion duo The Living Earth Show. The two have commissioned works from Samuel Carl Adams, Timo Andres, and Dan Becker, among others, and also play in the avant-metal band Freighter. “There’s kind of a lot of crossover between the two things that we do. The people that are apt to nerd out on rock and roll music are, I think, just a short push away from nerding out with chamber music.” That sentiment seems a lot less far-fetched when you hear them perform some of the new pieces being written for them, and there are a lot of new works being written for them because they’re basically building a repertoire from scratch.

The Living Earth Show rehearses in a small rented room above a commercial warehouse. The room’s walls are covered from floor to ceiling with oriental rugs, and the room itself is almost completely filled with percussion equipment, keyboards, amplifiers, electronics, and bikes. They’re currently rehearsing a new piece written for them by Max Stoffregen titled Quasimason. In some sections Stoffregen uses multiple guitar loops to create dense, layered textures accompanied by heavy drumbeats. In others he contrasts these heavy textures with sparser ones featuring frenetic, Zappa-like melodic fragments or serene, sustained passages. Andrews says the composers the group has worked with so far are eager to write for the unorthodox duo, and are taking full advantage of the electric guitar’s effects and looping possibilities. “A lot of people are more excited now–at least the crop of people we’ve talked to–in writing for electric guitar as opposed to writing for acoustic guitar,” Andrews says. “They feel like they have a lot more options with the sonic spectrum.” Meyerson and Andrews are also preparing Brian Ferneyhough’s Renvoi/Shards for quartertone guitar and vibraphone, and are about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for custom instruments on which to perform the work, as well as others they’ve commissioned. It’s hard to imagine an instrument more custom than Meyerson’s current vibraphone, though. According to his bio, it’s made from the bones of his enemies.

Andrew Meyerson, percussion, and Travis Andrews, guitar, rehearse Max Stoffregen’s Quasimason
Over in the Richmond district, the chamber group Nonsemble 6 is rehearsing in a space with slightly fewer wall hangings, much better acoustics, and familiar to chamber musicians of all stripes–a church. They’re working on John Harbison’s song cycle The Natural World for an upcoming performance as part of the Noe Valley Chamber Music Series. In the third movement, titled “Milkweed,” they work to achieve a tentative, probing quality in the movement’s murky opening bars. They have a wonderfully versatile ensemble sound, and the dark, blended timbres they create really illuminate the evocative elements of Harbison’s score. In addition to the Harbison, their upcoming program also contains Mario Davidovsky’s Biblical Songs, and the Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. As the group’s clarinetist Annie Phillips (yes, the same) says, “We don’t mess around.”

Nonsemble 6 rehearses John Harbison’s The Natural World
The musicians of Nonsemble 6 originally came together while graduate students at the San Francisco Conservatory to perform Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and have since taken up other pieces written for Pierrot ensemble, including the Davidovsky and Harbison. Like The Living Earth Show, Nonsemble 6 is also working to expand the repertoire for their unique instrumentation through commissions. Like the Magik*Magik Orchestra they do innovative educational programs–creating expressionist melodrama with third graders, for example. In an effort to reach new audiences the group also focuses on cross-genre collaborations, whether with other musical groups like math rockers Grains, or with visual artists. N6 has commissioned visual artists to create works that draw inspiration from pieces in their repertoire.

The members of Nonsemble 6 are active on multiple fronts. Pianist Ian Scarfe is one of the founders of Classical Revolution, an innovative chamber music series emphasizing community, collaboration, and access. Their concerts (usually free or very affordable) feature local musicians and lots of different musical styles and genres. Founded in 2006 when a few San Francisco Conservatory students and graduates got together for a chamber music reading session at Café Revolution in San Francisco’s Mission District, Classical Revolution has grown into a global endeavor, with active chapters in the U.S., Canada, England, and Germany. The original San Francisco chapter continues to present fifteen to twenty concerts a month at locations throughout the Bay Area. Scarfe, like Phillips, cellist Annie Suda and vocalist Amy Foote also performs with the Magik*Magik Orchestra. Foote feels that a diverse career path is the best, and for her, most satisfying way to build a career. “You do have to create this portfolio career where I’m not just an opera singer, I’m an opera singer, I’m a teacher, I play in a band,” she says. “You can’t build your career in the same way you did thirty years ago. Whatever your instrument is, it’s not like you can audition for one company and once you know this one person you’re in to the larger scene and you essentially work your way up. It just doesn’t work that way anymore.” What’s more important today, she says, is distinguishing yourself from the legions of other talented young musicians. “It’s not just that you’re really, really good at your craft anymore; lots of people are totally awesome at what they do. What the San Francisco scene is about, what it is to be a musician right now, is kind of a cliché. It’s to find what you’re passionate about, whether it be one thing or many things, and be working in all of those directions and having your hand in every basket so that someday one of those things your working on will work out.”

For musicians in the new music world, capitalizing on opportunities usually means creating them for yourself, and these young musicians willingly accept the responsibility of administering their ensembles and promoting their own shows in exchange for artistic freedom. For Phillips, the sense of satisfaction is well worth the effort. “I like creating something new, and I think there’s something very entrepreneurial about it. There are all these different little things that need to get done and it’s like running a business. So it’s more engaging for me to be able to do all of the non-musical things on the side and play, and there’s more opportunity there because if you want to do something, and know how to do all the work, then it happens.”

Cellist Michelle Kwon

Cellist Michelle Kwon

Cellist Michelle Kwon agrees. Kwon is active in the Northern California freelance scene, playing with the top regional orchestras as well as with the Magik*Magik Orchestra and the Delphi Trio, a piano trio she co-founded with violinist Liana Bérubé (also a Magik*Magik member) and pianist Jeffery LaDeur. She estimates that her time spent working with Delphi is split evenly between playing and administration, but feels that the extra work is not only necessary to the success of the group, but also important on a personal level. “Our goal is to really spread the love of chamber music as a genre, but also as a means of expression,” she says. “We believe that it’s one of the best representations of a player in terms of their own expressivity, their own ability to work with others in a very civil and intimate way.” For Kwon, the Bay Area’s acceptance of personal expression is one of the region’s defining characteristics. “I really think that on the individual level there’s a real attention to the ability to be expressive,” she says. “I think that it’s something that’s really hard to attain by training. You really have to be courageous, really be in tune with your instrument, and whether or not you play it technically perfect, you at least try and say something to someone else.”

In many ways the experiences of these musicians are similar to those in cities around the country. They’re hustling for gigs, teaching, working day jobs, and doing all the other things that musicians do to make ends meet. But they’re also part of a larger, interconnected community that is unique in its support of new things. Composer Ryan Brown feels the Bay Area new music scene is less competitive than other cities because people aren’t necessarily coming here to make a name for themselves. “That really contributes to that sense of open welcome-ness,” he says. “There’s a sense of ‘We’re here because we want to be here, and the more cool stuff you do here the more enjoyable it is for everybody’.” For Nonsemble 6 vocalist Amy Foote, this sense of community is part of what keeps her here. “Part of me has the desire to go to New York and strike it rich; I think every musician experiences that from time to time,” she says. “The reason I don’t go is the community out here. It’s the fact that I do know a lot of composers and I like what they do and I want to keep working with them.”

The San Francisco Bay Area is often caricatured as a “touchy-feely” place where you’re not allowed to hurt anyone’s feelings–an adult version of kid’s sports leagues where score isn’t kept and everybody wins. It’s not that simple, of course, but it is true that personal expression is something to be valued (not just tolerated), and this is liberating for young musicians. It gives them license to explore and experiment and pursue their passion, no matter how offbeat, because that’s simply what everyone expects. “The whole thing about audiences here is that no matter how weird your project is, someone will come listen to it. It’s a very accepting community,” says Phillips.

Because the musicians here feel free to pursue projects they’re most passionate about, they tend to be pretty enthusiastic about their careers. Even for those whose most rewarding projects may only represent a small percentage of their professional lives and income, the satisfaction and fulfillment they receive outweighs, or at least balances, the more mudane and frustrating aspects of a freelancer’s life. Michelle Kwon, who is dismayed by the dissatisfaction she senses in many of her “freeway philharmonic” colleagues, says projects like the Magik*Magik orchestra are extremely satisfying for her. “Magik*Magik is probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve done with my life. It really is the most grass-roots, altruistic form of playing music I can think of,” she says. Magik*Magik founder Minna Choi created such an atmosphere of trust and respect that it didn’t matter, in the early days of the group’s existence, whether or not they were making much money. “We didn’t get paid very much back then, but she had gathered people that were so interested in the same things she was that it actually really didn’t matter, which is something ideal. I can’t think of a better way to approach music.”

With so many musicians enthusing about their experiences with the Magik*Magik Orchestra, it’s not surprising that more players want to be involved. The group held auditions for the first time in September, and plans to continue these annually. What began as a group of motivated and entrepreneurial conservatory students has grown into a serious organization complete with interns and support from Fractured Atlas, and is a destination for a wider swath of musicians interested in their unique brand of collaboration.

If the musicians in the Magik*Magik Orchestra, Nonsemble 6, and The Living Earth Show have any advantage in this transformative time in the classical music world it is that this state of flux is nothing new for them. They have come of age in this environment, and as a result (and thanks to a few trailblazing individuals and ensembles), they have fewer preconceived notions of what a successful classical music career should entail. What they value most is pursuing projects that express who they are as musicians. Living in a region that values collaboration, experimentation, and personal expression makes it that much easier.

***

Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of the Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

Observations on the culture of Hindustani Classical Music

On an overnight train from Delhi to Jodhpur last month, I was seated next to a young, well-traveled author. We immediately realized we were both en route to the same music festival in Jodhpur and began discussing our musical tastes. I mentioned I was a Western classical musician, and he mused, “You know, I love almost every type of music I’ve heard, but for some reason, I’ve never been able to get into Western classical music. It’s probably my loss, but something about the audience’s reaction just throws me off. The polite applause, the coughing between movements–it doesn’t seem natural.”

I grew up in Los Angeles, studying piano and attending orchestra and chamber music concerts, so very little seemed unnatural to me about the culture of Western classical music. I am an American composer of Indian heritage, three months into my Fulbright year in New Delhi, where I am studying Hindustani classical music intensively for the first time. I spend my days not only practicing vocal exercises and sitting for class with my teacher, but also meeting incredible Indian classical musicians and going to as many concerts as I can. I am learning the music of this culture in the same way I am learning Hindi, its language—I learn as much from formal study as from the environment in which it exists.

Vegetable Vendor

I wake up early each morning to the sound of the subziwallas (vegetable vendors) walking up and down the streets with their carts, loudly enumerating their daily selection in a characteristic call, as residents shout their orders back from the balconies above. Cars, motorbikes, trucks, and cycle rickshaws drive down the street, honking at least a few times for good measure, and more liberally with the slightest provocation. The maid, the milkman, and the woman who collects the garbage ring my doorbell persistently until I answer, and sometimes they will even stay for a cup of tea and a chat. Coming from America, where we place a high value on privacy, I was initially overwhelmed by the constant interruptions. But it didn’t take long for the sense of community to grow on me: The sheer number and variety of people that exist in such a small space requires Indians to adopt a nonchalant attitude of adaptivity, each unapologetically adding their own distinct textures into a vibrant morning soundscape.

It is this very aesthetic that spills into the Indian concert hall. In the West, the environment of concert music is one of transcendence. We use our music to transport our listeners from the concert hall to another private world, created by the interaction of the listener’s imagination and the music. This event demands complete silence and a great deal of focus. No one dare cough, breathe too loudly, or rustle a bag for fear of puncturing that delicate sonic plane.

While transcendence is also the aim of Indian classical music, it is weighed against the equally vital component of audience involvement, often superseding the total silence that is mandated by Western listeners. To this end, it is completely acceptable to talk during concerts. Often, one listener will turn to another to comment about the performance, sometimes for a moment and sometimes at great length. People not only take pictures, set up tripods, and record, but often they will come right up to the stage mid-performance to do it. The audience moves about freely, walking in and out of the hall as necessary instead of waiting for a piece to be over to mask their movement with applause. While each artist has their specific demands for the level of silence and stillness in the hall, the fact remains that the audience is a vital part of the musical environment, and the artist seeks its audible interaction.

This environment of interaction mandates a different performance practice on the part of the artist as well. After getting settled on the stage, checking the mics and tuning, the artist will speak directly and candidly to the audience. The artist takes the pleasure and delight of the audience very seriously. In addition to saying a bit about the music, and sometimes asking forgiveness from both the audience and God for any mistakes committed during the performance (a common gesture that I have always found incredibly earnest and humbling), practical matters will also be addressed: Is everyone in the hall able to hear properly? Do they all have a place to sit?

Sitting audience

A concert at Moti Mahal, Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur: The audience often sits on the floor with the artist. While taking pictures is considered uninvasive, pointing the soles of one’s feet at the artist is strictly prohibited.

 

One of the most inspiring musicians I have heard in India so far is renowned Hindustani vocalist Begum Parveen Sultana. She performed at Kamani Auditorium in Delhi last month, and not only was every seat in the huge hall taken, but people were sitting three across in the aisles and lining all the walls (fire codes apparently do not exist here). Parveenji looked out into the hall and, seeing the hordes of people who had come to hear her sing, she immediately invited the people without seats to join her on the stage, saying warmly, “Come, come! There is plenty of room up here!”

Begum Parveen Sultana

Begum Parveen Sultana sings at Kamani Auditorium on October 8, 2011 in the Delhi Classical Music Festival. She is accompanied by a tabla player, a harmonium players, and two young singers who are playing the tanpura to accompany her.

 

Even after the performance has started, it isn’t uncommon for the artist to make requests from the stage between musical phrases: Can the mic level be brought up? Can someone bring a cup of tea, or a glass of water? At almost every concert I’ve attended, someone will inevitably rush onto the stage midway through the performance to deliver bottles of water to members of the ensemble.

As the artist connects with the audience from the stage, the audience also responds visibly from their seats. Many people mark out a specific beat pattern, keeping time with their hands on their knees and making large unabashed gestures that are visible to the artist on important beats. After a particularly virtuosic or ingenious passage, there will be loud remarks of approval (Arre wah! Aesa!–Oh, wow! That’s the way!).

Perhaps due to the fact that the concert hall is a recent installation in Indian culture, there are not really curtain calls and long rounds of applause, as the artist doesn’t make a particularly grand entrance or exit from the stage. Following the performance, after a short round of applause, audience members will begin yelling out suggestions, usually for the artist’s signature works. The artist will engage in an informal three-way discussion with the audience and the concert presenter, weighing the amount of time allotted for the performance against the desires of the audience, and reach a consensus before beginning the requested encore(s). Parveenji was so dedicated to her audience that as they shouted requests, she said, in Hindi, “Of course! I will try to sing everything you want. Even if the curtain falls on me, I will keep singing from behind it!”

This direct, unmitigated interaction seemed very foreign to me at first, coming from the West. These days the Western concert hall tends towards polite but hands-off interactions with the artists. Shouting, “Encore!” or bringing flowers to the stage is probably the most interaction an audience member will have with a performer, and I had grown comfortable with that “respectful distance.”

But even as recently as the famous Rite of Spring riots in 1913, it seemed that the interaction between audience and performer in the West bore much more resemblance to what I’ve been seeing in India recently. There is undoubtedly a complex web of reasons why our musical climate may have once been closer to this one. But one commonality between older classical music and Hindustani music exists that may have something to do with it: form.

The Meghwal of Marwar

The Meghwal of Marwar, a band of tandura players from Rajasthan perform bhajans of saint-poet Meera Bai in an outdoor concert at the Jodhpur RIFF festival.

 

Since the time of Bach, by some accounts, Hindustani music has been dominated by a style of music called khayal, which, literally translated, means “idea,” “opinion,” or even “imagination.” While, as the name suggests, the actual phrases rendered are largely left up to the artist’s improvisatory inclinations, they are couched in a rigid formal structure.

From a formal standpoint, it can be argued that khayal is for Hindustani music what sonata-allegro form was for Western classical music. Sonata-allegro form, simply stated, guided the audience through a long piece of music, dividing it into sections, each with a set of broad specifications, tied together by inter-sectional unifying elements. The understanding of this form provided the audience with a commonly trod road map, which resulted in an easy point of entry into the music.

A basic khayal presentation is comprised of four sections, each faster than the next. Some are pure improvisation and elaboration on a raag, while others draw from and expand upon previously composed material. Though the technical specifications and aesthetic purpose of each section vary vastly from sonata-allegro form, the presence of such a form serves largely the same purpose.

Before beginning a piece, the artist will usually start by announcing the raag (scale) to be sung. In the olden days (and perhaps still in elite circles today), leaving raags unidentified was a matter of prestige: While Westerners have two main scales, there are hundreds of raags, and the same expertise was required to correctly identify a raag as would be required on a drop-the-needle test in the West. For many experienced listeners, just the name of the raag will call to mind a context: the notes in the raag and their correct means of elaboration, as well as characteristic phrases (pakads) that define the raag.

However, even if an audience member doesn’t know a certain raag (and I certainly don’t know many of them), s/he need not worry: the beginning section of each composition is a slow unmetered section called an aalap.

Made up of long, flowing, improvised phrases that grow from the tonic note, they slowly work their way through the various registers of the voice from low to high, exposing each note of the raga and emphasizing key phrases that identify it. This section serves the practical purpose of allowing the artist to settle their voice into each register while simultaneously attuning the listener’s ear to forthcoming complexities. If the listener knows the raag, s/he listens for the artist’s ingenuity in its elaboration. If not, s/he uses this section to become acclimated to the content of the piece, one note at a time.

In vocal concerts, something I’ve found both beautiful and helpful, especially in the aalap, is the expressive use of the hand. We are taught in the West not to move our hands unless necessary, and even then, just to make broad and specific gestures that don’t detract from the music—much vocal training is dedicated to getting rid of superfluous motion so the body is correctly positioned to resonate and project. But in Indian music, hand motion is a conduit for expression. With one palm open, in a gesture that seems to beckon the audience, the singer will trace the outline of a phrase in the air while singing. Unlike Western structures such as the Guidonian Hand, there is no methodic correlation between the gestures and the notes. But in a melodic language where subtle nuance is often lost to our Western ears, I find that these hand gestures, which provide a visual representation of the complex twists and turns in each phrase, provide a clear roadmap of the artist’s intention.

By the time the artist reaches the end of the aalap section, the audience has settled into the sound world of the raga. The tabla (percussion) then enters and a certain taal, or rhythmic cycle (like a time signature, but often longer and more complex) is established. The audience members who are familiar with the rhythmic cycle will also tap their hands in the specified beat pattern. The artist begins to sing a short composition in the established raag called a bandish. The bandish is usually an ancient four-line song with text in Hindi or Brajbasha, passed down aurally through generations of musicians. Musically, it serves as a storehouse for all the particular nuances of the raag it is in, and contains the melodic seeds for correct elaboration of that raag. For the audience, the most important and memorable part of the bandish is the first phrase, called the mukhra, or “face,” which serves as a marker during the remainder of the piece.

The final section of a piece is made up of very fast technical passages called taans. These are also improvised at about the speed we would associate with sixteenth notes, and are either sung in sargam (Indian solfege syllables) or aakar (vocalizing on “aa”). This is the artist’s chance to demonstrate both pyrotechnical virtuosity and rhythmic ingenuity.  The artist must end each taan right before the beat in the rhythmic cycle where the mukhra returns, and the game is to see how ingenious and creative he can get with the taans while still sliding in to home base just in enough time to grab the mukhra. The members of the audience hold their breath as the critical beat draws near, all the while keeping time with their hands, waiting to see how the artist will find his way back.

Once a successful landing on the mukhra has been made, especially if the taan has been particularly long and difficult, there is a moment of connection between the audience and the musician. The musician will momentarily loosen focus and actually make eye contact with both the ensemble and the audience. The look is often one that seeks approval, and the audience members will, in turn, voice that approval by nodding their heads and waving their hands in a particularly Indian gesture that, if a translation were possible, would say something like, “Ah! There it goes.”

When I played the tanpura (the stringed instrument that produces the drone) in my teacher Gaurav Mazumdar’s sitar performance a few weeks after arriving in Delhi, this was one of the first things I noticed while looking out into the audience from the stage. Each time he landed on the mukhra after a difficult passage, a smattering of hands would go up in this very gesture. Aside from being instant feedback for my teacher as he gauged his audience’s response to his improvisations, I found it very encouraging to look out and see these gestures of acknowledgement and approval.

Of course, there is no obligation on the part of the audience to approve of the artist’s ability. The artist is trying to please, and it is up to the audience to clearly indicate his success on that front. I’ve been to concerts where there is relatively little response from the audience, where things are perhaps not quite to their liking. On the other hand, when I attended Parveenji’s concert, people actually applauded and yelled after every single taan. And rightly so: each one was more divine than the next.

***

Things move more slowly in India. The permeating sense of urgency we have in the West is just not part of the culture here. Everything moves at its natural pace, just as the clay idols of the goddess Durga float unhurriedly in currents of the Yamuna on the final day of Durga Puja.

Durga Puja

This is as true in the study of music as in every other facet of Indian life. Hours may be dedicated to singing just a single note. Weeks can be spent singing up and down the scale of a single raag. It might be six months to a year before a musician can settle comfortably into the nuances of any given raag, and longer before they can improvise within it. Indian music theory is relatively simple in comparison to Western theory: it can be learned easily in a few days, but it comprises a much smaller portion of the total musical experience. The actual realization of a raag requires the gradual but persistent building of intuition so that extemporaneous renditions can incorporate subtleties that cannot be taught in any methodical, quantitative way.

The only element of Western music I can relate this to is our minor scale. We learn in textbooks about the three different kinds of minors, their purposes, and the logic behind usage of sharp or natural notes. But ultimately, any person who has heard enough Western music can easily hear when it sounds right or wrong. Paul Henry Lang, in his book Music in Western Civilization, argues that the minor scale is a vestige of a time when Eastern and Western music were more connected. Indeed, the raags in Indian music contain a multitude of nuances similar to this one that can truly be learned only by context and repetition, as one learns the usage of words in a language as a child.

So it’s not surprising that, as we learn language from our parents, an overwhelming percentage of the younger musicians who accompany the great artists are their own children. Until recently, most families in India had a specific line of work. Whether they were sweets-makers or politicians (like the Gandhis), most trades were carried through the generations. Even in Hindustani music, there are gharanas (the Hindi word ghar means home), families of musicians that have cultivated a certain style over generations. As the years passed, dedicated students outside the family would occasionally be allowed to learn with them, but even then, they were more like adopted children than students.

While the concept of gharanas is not democratic, they have produced a number of interesting results. Up until the dawn of All-India Radio in the 1930s, there was very little cross-pollination between musicians, to the point that certain musical secrets were guarded like treasured family recipes. Styles would develop unaffected by the outside world, and this resulted in a great variety of highly specific stylistic traditions. In addition, most of these musicians have started their education from the womb, and have been guided in their practice for upwards of eight hours daily. By the time they reach an age at which they are able to concertize, their level of musicianship is extremely high. In order to imbibe such subtleties too complex to be written down and also to acquire the ability to improvise freely within these subtleties, a high level of immersion is required.

Often one or two of these younger musicians will also be present on stage during a concert of an established artist. Commonly in vocal concerts, the artist will gesture to the younger musicians, and they will sing a few phrases at a time. This serves two purposes: the artist is able to rest for a minute during a very taxing performance, and the young musician gets a chance to be an active part of the performance, singing a few phrases for an audience before they have the endurance to sustain an entire concert.

This is something I find brilliant about the Indian teaching tradition: the transition from practice with a teacher into performance in front of an audience is gradual, and by the time young musicians are ready to spread their own wings, they have already had a taste of the dynamic of interaction with a large variety of audiences.

Since I set foot in India this past August, I have been constantly inspired by the music I hear. But it’s not just due to my immersion in the world of Hindustani music, where almost everything I hear is new to me. It’s because I can see these two beautiful musical traditions and their surrounding cultures side by side. And from that perspective, it is pointless to think in rights and wrongs, in clichés and taboos. I can only think in possibilities.

***

Reena Esmail

Composer Reena Esmail‘s works have been heard in performances and festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad. She studied composition at Juilliard and the Yale School of Music, and is currently on a Fulbright grant, studying Hindustani classical music in India. Her travel blog can be found here.

Student Learning in the Music School

Two Foundational Questions

".5" by rebecca anne on Flickr

As a final task for my master’s degree, I sat for an oral exam.  Before entering graduate school, I had been an ambivalent student and so I prepared to be questioned with the zealous fervor of a recent convert.  My study paid off, and I answered each question with aplomb. After thirty minutes, the questions came more slowly and the follow-up questions stopped altogether.  It began to feel like that experience I would have after a class that was too long or a lesson that was too short:  when time passes slowly, it is time to leave.  My mentors must have experienced something similar, and smiles and nods became a tacit acknowledgement:  we were done.  However, as I rose to leave, one of the professors stayed the group with the phrase, “I have just one more question.”   Convinced that I had already aced the exam, I sat down and raised one eyebrow in a gesture that I fully intended to mean, “Bring it, Pops.”

“How do you teach someone to compose music?”

Nothing in Dalhaus or Adorno had prepared me for this question, nor had I scribbled the answer among the staves in one of my dozens of spiral-bound sketchbooks. The university archives do not record whatever answer I may have stammered that day, and it was probably irrelevant to the grading: I think the professor was simply putting me in my place.

I suspect my introduction to college teaching is not unlike the experience of many professors in America, particularly in the arts.  Prior to being asked this question at the end of my degree program, little had been said about teaching.  Indeed, my orientation for teaching a fifty-student section of Music Fundamentals was as follows:  “You can use this desk. Here’s the book we use. Don’t screw this up.”

I muddled through, improved, and eventually thrived in teaching.  Many of us do.  There is much to be said for professors who pursue an idiomatic and self-directed path in the teaching profession.

More recently, after years of teaching and light administrative duties, I was confounded by another related, yet broader question.  I was again seated at a long conference table surrounded by august professors, but this time, I was posing the question I could not answer.  Raising my weary eyes from pages of transcripts and audition scores, I asked:

“While it seems laudable to be concerned with how to teach someone to compose, shouldn’t the question rather be, how can I be sure that my students have learned anything at all?”

We now arrive gently, by way of meandering anecdote, to the topic at hand: understanding student learning in a music school.  Given that each music professor achieves his or her expertise in a highly idiomatic way and must impart that expertise in a highly idiomatic way, how does one measure learning across a cohort of music school students?

 

A Short History of Accreditation

Any teacher at an American school will, at some point in his or her career, wrestle with models of assessing student learning in a manner that can be reported to accreditors.  In some cases, colleges may have overlapping accrediting obligations.  For example, my institution is accredited by the state, a regional accrediting agency, and the agency specific to the discipline.  In what follows, I will not speak to the specific requirements of any one accreditor but rather one common characteristic: Congress requires the Secretary of Education to require accreditors to use “an appropriate measure or measures of student achievement.”  [20 USC 1099 § Sec. 1099b]

Accreditation is a means of quality assurance in higher education.  The term quality assurance comes from heavy industry by way of 17th-century shipbuilding.  In those endeavors, the government, as investor, wants a full accounting of any monies invested in a schooner. Or a student.

When government gives or lends money to schools or students, it buys oversight of the school’s finances and mission-critical operations.  The contractual nature of the government-school relationship can be discerned in an 1824 letter from Lord Burghersh, the founder of the Royal Academy of Music, to Lord Liverpool, then Prime Minister of Great Britain:

To effect these objects we require an increase to our funds … I am aware that if it is granted, the Government would have a right to look into, and alter and correct, if it thought necessary, the laws and regulations by which the Institution is at present governed, as well as to claim a control over it, or, in the exercise of its discretion, to leave that control as it at present exists, in the hands of the Directors. But these are minor details…

In addition to playing and composing, Lord Burghersh was a lifelong soldier and diplomat.  He certainly understood that money from the crown came with the expectation of quality assurance.

Unlike most other countries, the United States cannot take a direct role in accreditation, as the framers of the Constitution left oversight of higher education to individual states.   A cursory review of our nation’s forefathers indicates that one would be hard pressed to find a good applicant for graduate school among them: most did not complete college.  They saw little value in the “old course” curriculum modeled on the English universities.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, however, it became clear that higher education was vital to the progress of the nation. Many of those “drop-outs” who wrote the Constitution were instrumental in founding new colleges with new curricula. The young nation faced problems that were not adequately addressed by teaching the scions of wealthy planters to translate odes from Greek to Latin.  In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act [7 USC § 301-309] to require all states to set aside land and monies for state universities that would teach agricultural and mechanical arts.  Yet, even as some states were seceding from the union, Congress was reluctant to exercise direct control or supply direct support for higher education.

In 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill [P.L. 78-346, 58 Stat. 284m] in order to subsidize college education for enlisted personnel returning from World War II.  The federal government poured money into colleges and universities but relied on states to ensure the legitimate operations of the institutions receiving the funds.  As the student loan debt soared after the Korean Conflict, the nation wrestled with civil rights issues that were not adequately addressed at the state level. Consider: Governor George Wallace made his ceremonial stand against integration by trying to prevent two African American students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

Governor George Wallace stands defiant at the University of Alabama

The Johnston Administration sought to address a number of these issues with the Higher Education Act of 1965 [Pub. L. No. 89-329].  The HEA has provided funding for two generations of college students.  However, it has also called for more oversight of colleges.  Since the federal government could not directly participate in overseeing school operations, it required accreditation by regional agencies which were recognized by the federal government.

For years, this arrangement, a kind of cooperative federalism, was agreeable to all parties.  The accrediting agencies, which had existed since the late-19th century, continued their self-directed efforts and reported their findings to the government.   However, the nature of this relationship changed with the surge of student loans:  the federal government provides over $150 billion in financial aid to students each year.  The concern for propriety has caused what Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, called an accidental transformation of accreditation. The federal government cannot tell schools what it wants for its money, but it can tell accreditors what they expect of an accredited school.

I sometimes like to think of Lord Burghersh, writing from Florence in the wig and finery befitting a royal embassy.  His letter, no doubt closed with an insignia in sealing wax, traveled across Europe by ship and rider before reaching the Palace of Westminster.  There similarly dressed men scratched their similar wigs and considered whether or not Parliament should advise the King to increase funding to the Royal Academy.  It strikes me that, wigs notwithstanding, the situation was not unlike the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Lord Burghersh

And that gives me pause. Lord Burghersh’s request was denied.

 

Obligation and Opportunity

The need for student financial aid ensures the continued role of accreditation in higher education, as college tuition and expenses are considerable in the context of the average family income.  The good people of Bonn sent Beethoven to Vienna.  Scaled to our economy, one doubts they could have put enough funds in escrow to merit an F-1 visa.

Musician-professors recognize the importance of financial aid. After all, musicians have a long history of accommodating those who have paid the piper, dropped a dime in the jukebox, or commissioned the requiem by masked courier, &c. The chore can be accomplished and the purse can be claimed with only a show of due diligence.

This is unfortunate. The faculty of a music school is not interested in a path of least resistance: indeed, that faculty courts rigor and rote learning.  And yet, despite a single-minded focus to recruit the best students and improve them at all costs, faculty are invariably resistant to engage in a process to evaluate teaching and learning.  I believe this resistance comes from fundamental misunderstandings about assessment.  The means of assessing student learning are actually quite familiar to a trained musician, but the standards and mechanisms are expressed in language that comes from the study of education.   When engaging a community of musicians, often a successful first step is to translate the pidgin of accreditors into the patois of musicians.

 

Four Questions

In essence, evaluating student learning consists of four questions:

1. How does the school define its objectives for students?
2. What are the instructional means the school provides for students to meet those objectives?
3. How does the school determine whether or not the students are meeting those learning objectives?
4. What does the school do to either improve student achievement of those learning objectives or to maintain demonstrated success?

Let us examine these four questions in some detail.

 

The First Question: The Obligatory Mission Statement

The first question asks how a school defines its learning objectives.  The objectives here tend to get conflated with a mission statement, and indeed accreditors often examine the mission statement of a school as the top-level enumeration of goals.  More broadly the learning objectives should inform each requirement of a program, from mission statement, to department, to faculty, to course, to a grade at the end of the semester.

In my experience, faculty tend to dismiss the importance of the first question. (Objective? Duh! Musical awesomeness. Next question.)  We will indeed move on, but we will have occasion to return.

 

The Second Question: Division of Labor, Multiplied

The second question asks what the school does to help students achieve the learning objectives.  Long before it is ever asked by accreditors, this question tends to generate long, sometimes contentious discussions about what students need to take, or need to study, or should learn.  Indeed, this was the question I was asked at my exam: How do you teach someone?

The role and relationship of subjects in curriculum: these are weighty matters. These discussions invariably touch on the things we value as musicians; the things that brought us to the music school in the first place; the things that, the preservation of which, will keep many of us from leaving.

Ultimately an institution’s curriculum will be idiomatic and reflect the values of the faculty.  Curriculum is proprietary like a trade secret (only not profitable and not a secret).  In general, accreditors are less interested in the decisions we make than the discussions that lead to the decisions. They want the quality assurance of knowing that qualified faculty are discussing the curricula and making considered decisions.

Having finally determined what our alumni should be able to do and how we will teach them to do it, we arrive at the crux of the matter: determining whether or not the students are learning anything at all.

 

The First Two Questions As Impetus for a Cancrizans Curriculum

When devising a new course, a discussion may sound something like this: “Well, I’m going to begin with a lecture on this.  Then I’ll probably talk about a little of that.  And of course, it’s important for me to cover that other thing.”  In other words, the original approach to the class considers content: the this, that, and other thing of the class.  And that is appropriate.  However, after some discussion of the content and its proper order, it is important to reconsider the verbs: just because we lecture, talk, and cover content, there’s no guarantee that it gets learned.

Robert Erickson, the composer who founded the music department at UCSD, observed that “teaching is not the transferring of information from teacher to student.  Information gets imparted, but it may be the least of the things that go on in a classroom.”

Like Erickson, I acknowledge that classroom time used for structured interpretation of music should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate extraordinary digressions, which may prove useful in unpredictable ways.  To preserve that time, it may prove more useful to push the content out of the discussion space and monitor comprehension with summative assessments.  Said briefly, one can teach with assignments and assess the learning in real time during classroom discussions.

Ultimately, it may be irrelevant to consider what students will know when they complete a class. It is far more useful to ask what students will be able to do when they complete a class.    Once we determine what a summative assessment will be—be it an exam, a paper, or a fugue—we can determine the formative assessment—or smaller tasks to assign—that will build the skill set required for the summative assessment.

This model of curricula is typically described with the phrase (or battle cry) assessment drives curriculum.  In recent years, this view of curricula has taken on negative connotations, especially when said with fewer syllables and considerably less swagger:  teaching to the test.

The idea of teaching to the specification of a standardized test is repugnant to faculty.  It robs them of the agency of determining the final objective of their teaching.  But the larger idea—the idea of assessment driving curriculum—is still a viable model for a music school.  Faculty regain ownership of the process when they control the assessment.

Nobody objects to teaching to the test when they make the test.  And at a music school, we’ve already got the test. Our test will not require a no. 2 pencil, but it may require formal wear.

 

The Third Question:  Unstandardized Testing

Performance is the objective of most undergraduate study.  Performance is also a summative assessment of musical accomplishment.  We rehearse ( = learning) to perform (= demonstrating learning).   We even use the expression “learning a score.”  Conversely, an assessment of an employee in any other field is typically called a “performance review.”  And yet despite these intermingling connotations, many overlook the relationship between a public performance and a student assessment.

Take, for instance, the term “recital.” The word conjures up a mix of associations to musicians that may be lost outside of a musical school.  If one’s experience with music instruction ended before college, it might be a surprise to learn that an undergraduate’s senior recital is not a matter of Andy Hardy shouting, “Hey, kids: let’s put on a show!”

Consider the dimensions of an undergraduate senior, as they apply to an assessment of student learning:

A recital is an assessment.  It follows a period of individual instruction called a “lesson.” It validates student learning by making a public demonstration of the behavioral objectives in what is called a “performance.”

A recital is a requirement for most undergraduate degrees, more commonly seen in educational models as a capstone project.  Most graduate programs require proof of an undergraduate recital prior to allowing students to matriculate.

The recital is typically a for-credit requirement with a grade.  In such cases, the recital is more than an assessment: it is, in essence, a class.   Since the recital is typically graded by more than one professor, the recital is the rare case of a class that has one student and multiple instructors.

The recital typically happens in the last two years of undergraduate study.  Prior to the recital, students typically play year-end assessments for multiple faculty members, called a ” jury.”

Thus, after the weekly formative assessment in 1:1 instruction in a lesson, the student demonstrates the learning in the summative assessment of a jury. Juries, in turn, become formative assessments in pursuit of the ultimate summative assessment and capstone project, the recital.

Nothing in this list is unduly contorted from the procedures we use at my institution: procedures that have, in fact, been in place for decades.  I have merely reworded and  recontextualized our basic principles—principles we tend to hold dear—into the language of accreditation.   When considered in the vernacular of assessment, music schools are well-positioned to demonstrate student learning. What other discipline affords 1:1 instruction for every student or a public demonstration of student learning?

Following the logic of this argument, it becomes clear how so much of what happens in a music school plays a role in benchmarking student aptitude or measuring student achievement.

For example, my institution just matriculated 105 new undergraduates for the fall semester.

Each played an audition seven months ago to be admitted (data point), submitted transcripts and standardized test results, and took onsite diagnostic exams in music theory and ear-training (four more data points).

Most re-took exams in music theory and ear training on arrival (data point and placement).

All had an individual audition with a member of the Keyboard Studies faculty (data point and placement).

All took an audition for ensembles (data point and placement).

The result of this battery of tests and auditions is a surprisingly flexible and individualized learning plan for students in one of 28 concentrations for the Bachelor of Music Degree.  Two years ago, a poll of 111 undergraduates revealed that only 12% of students began their first semester without either: 1) advanced placement through on-site skills testing, AP testing, and/or transfer credits; 2) remedial coursework to take in addition (or in place of) the stipulated first semester classes; or 3) some combination of advanced placement or remedial coursework.

Data?  We are awash in data.

 

The Fourth Question, or Sempre Da Capo

If we have diligently worked through the first three questions, we arrive at the fourth:  now what?  What do we make of all this data we have collected?  The correct next step is to assess the assessment by revisiting each of the four questions.

Returning to that first question, we might remark that musical awesomeness seemed kind of funny at the time.  However, it may be more appropriate to add practical dimensions to what we might imagine for our students.  Is it okay if our students are musically awesome sales associates at Abercrombie and Fitch?  If that is okay, must we fly a top-tier bassoonist in from Düsseldorf to achieve that outcome?

Naturally, any changes to the mission will necessitate changes to the curriculum.  Any changes to the curriculum will necessitate changes to the means of assessment.  Finally, when that next batch of data arrives, we take the segno back to da capo and play it for more ornamentation.

This constant state of revision is a healthy process and predates the heightened inquiry of accrediting agencies.  But there is a difference.  In the past, institutions—especially music conservatories—were shaped by strong leaders who could make changes by fiat.  Whatever the logic and propriety of the L&M program adopted at Juilliard in the 1940s or the Third-Stream program adopted at the New England Conservatory in the 1960s, one thing is very clear: both William Schuman and Gunther Schuller pursued their curricular designs with very little oversight and no significant data to predict success.

Now that we are managing a wealth of data, it’s fair to ask: are we making better decisions?

 

Data and the False Sense of Security

According to Dika Newlin, when Schoenberg was teaching at UCLA he used the expression Rhaberberkontrapunkt to describe the various lines in Stravinsky’s music.  When asked, Schoenberg—perhaps harkening back to his days in Berlin cabaret—would explain, “Extras in the German theatre would yell ‘Rhabarber‘ (Rhubarb) over and over again to give the effect of a large crowd. ‘Rhabarber counterpoint’ is equally noisy, busy, and empty of content.”

We live in a world that is increasingly saturated with data. Corporations that previously paid vast sums for research seem to pay greater sums for people who can make sense of the sprawling data sets.  Much of that data—like so much ornamentation on the musical surface—is merely flash. Rhaberberkontrapunkt. At some level, data becomes merely the bling-bling of higher-ed administrivia.

That’s cause for concern.  Information, regardless of its utility, always seems pregnant with possibility.  Increasingly, business schools teach future MBAs to collect data like law schools teach future lawyers to ask questions: with at least some idea of the answer and its consequences. Indeed, the danger of collecting the wrong information has already been fashioned into a pithy epigram in leadership circles:  be careful what you measure, because what you measure is what you’ll manage.

We have measured the learning of student musicians.  But are we stuck managing only the learning that is demonstrated in juries and final projects?

A sense of the inflexibility and routine of some curricula is captured in this excerpt from an interview with the recording artist St. Vincent.  When asked why she dropped out of music school, she answered:

I think that with music school and art school, or school in any form, there has to be some system of grading and measurement. The things they can teach you is quantifiable. While all that is good and has its place, at some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music.

I think a lot of people, if they’re not careful, can err on the side of the quantifiable and approach it like an athlete. Run that little bit faster, do that little bit more and think you’re being more successful. But the truth is that a lot of times it’s not necessarily about merely being the best athlete, it’s about attempting a new sport.

I couldn’t agree more.  However a tendency to err on the side of the quantifiable is not a necessary byproduct of assessment and accreditation.   Rather, I would argue that institutions that unduly prize the results of complicated systems of assessment suffer from a want of innovation.

A curriculum seems rigid.  Indeed, the very word derives from a Latin word for “race track.”  A system of assessment seems inflexible and has the taint of governmental bureaucracy.  But the system does not impose inflexibility onto freedom: rather, it heightens whatever inflexibility has been built into the institution.  If what we require of our students is that they play a new sport, then we should have sufficient data on that student to demonstrate how it is integral to achieving the objectives of the mission statement.  We must make the data work for us, not as ornament but as a plastic substance suitable for developing variation.  A bit of “inside the box” thinking should make it possible to reconfigure the answers to questions two and three until a new box can be devised.  In short, our curricular structures are a box of our own making and subject to our customizations.

 

Final Thoughts

Recently I had the opportunity to speak to some college students about a piece I composed.  When asked about the pacing of a certain passage, I froze.  I knew the answer, but I wasn’t sure if I should answer with absolute candor.

The truth?  Often when I consider the pacing of a passage, I think about James Brown.  I think about how he slowly asks the band if they are ready for the next section. I think about how he telegraphs uncertainty about whether even the audience is ready.  And I think about how that makes a simple prolongation of a subdominant seem like the answer to all the world’s problems. Like James Brown has made the IV chord as bright as the sun. Is that an appropriate measure of musical pacing?  Could such an idiomatic experience be meaningful to a student?  By what index could one gauge the newness of Papa’s bag?

I still have no idea how to teach someone to compose music.  Some days I’m not so sure I can do it myself.  Fortunately, that is not my job.  I work at an institution of artists-teachers, and I trust my colleagues to do this work and do it well.

However, I can be sure that the students at my institution are learning.  We matriculate students with a lot of data. We set clear benchmarks.  We communicate the work in the classroom—the ongoing assessments—across departments.  We test and assess and give feedback.  And we strive constantly to revise our programs.

In short, we have embraced student learning assessment.  We don’t talk about a concordance of the formative assessment in lessons and ensembles and the summative assessment of juries.  We don’t marvel that aural competencies of ear-training resonate in the semi-structured learning laboratory that is the chamber ensemble.  All that stuff is for the reports we file for our parent university, the State, and the Department of Education.  It’s all true, but it’s not exactly grateful reading.   Inside the 19th-century walls of my institution, the concerns of student learning assessment get adumbrated into a single question that is more germane to our mission:

Are we doing everything we can to make the students as musical as possible?

That is the thing we want to measure and manage. And that is what the assessment of student learning asks of us.

 

Resources:

Evolving Bibliography on Accreditation

Music School Histories

Recent Periodical Literature

***

Paul Mathews

Paul Mathews is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he has taught as part of the Music Theory Faculty since 1998.   He is the author/editor of Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings (Routledge, 2006) and co-author, with Phyllis Bryn-Julson, of the book Inside Pierrot lunaire (Scarecrow Press, 2009).   Most recently, his opera Piecing it Apart was premiered by the Figaro Project.

The “I” in Dedication

A thought experiment: you’re a performer, opening a score for the first time. On the first page of music, in small print, just under the title, a phrase catches your eye: “To Milton Babbitt.” Really? “Oooh,” you might think, or, “Yikes!” But deeper reactions follow. “What’s the story here?” you wonder. You reflect on the composer’s biography: Was she a student of Babbitt’s? Did she go to Juilliard? Could she have met him elsewhere? But—wait—how old is this composer? Perhaps she was not a student but more of a peer. Perhaps the dedication represents one link in a chain of reciprocation between the two composers. Did Babbitt dedicate something to her as well? Or maybe he helped advance her career somehow?

Later, your process of learning the piece is haunted by Babbitt’s spectral (ha?) shape. You arrive at a passage of registral saturation, and that unmistakable round head with horn-rimmed glasses provokes other questions: Could he have written this? Or at least inspired it? You begin to wonder if your performance of certain passages should be informed by your experience with Babbitt’s music. You realize, of course, that it probably already has been.

Now imagine a similar scenario in which the exact same piece is dedicated to Philip Glass. You would pose the same questions about the composer’s biography and reciprocation (and would again stifle an “Oooh!” or “Yikes!”). But your process of learning the piece would probably change; the hovering spirit of Glass would highlight other musical characteristics and would inform your interpretation differently. Where you might before have seen quasi-serialist gestures, for instance, you might now find vaguely tonal, fragmentary arpeggios.

Though they might seem at first blush superficial and fleeting, the inquiries prompted by dedications in this kind of mental exercise are in fact deeply revealing. It’s not so radical to claim that music involves multi-layered communication between the composer and performer (assuming the two don’t exist in the same body), between the audience and the performer (assuming there is a performer), and between the composer and the audience. The dedication introduces a calculated human element into all of these interactions. It presents a persona, carrying all sorts of implications regarding a composer’s personal and professional associations as well as the work’s musical content, and inviting those who interact with it to view the composer and the piece in a broader context than they might otherwise.

 

What is a dedication?

You might ordinarily think of the dedication as the product of an older economy, a Western European one in which composers were supported by Renaissance Men of Importance in short dresses and tights—and you’d be right. In recognition of patronage, or as a way to seek future sponsorship, composers offered written works usually to individuals from the court and clergy.

Like most cultural practices, the dedication did adapt to changes in power structure. Most interestingly, in the later 18th century, approximately at the time that crowns—or at least tights—went out of style, composers began to dedicate works to each other. Some of you might know, for instance, Mozart’s string quartets (K. 387, 421, 428, 458, 464, 465) for Haydn (1785) or Beethoven’s Op. 2 piano sonatas for Haydn (1796). Most 19th- and 20th-century composers, in fact, dedicated at least one work to a peer or teacher.

Beethoven 3 Sonatas for harpsichord or pianoforte

Ludwig van Beethoven, 3 Sonatas for harpsichord or pianoforte, op. 3 (Vienna: Artiaria, 1796). By permission of Brian Jeffrey and Tecla Editions

And thus the modern musical dedicatory practice was born: composers now offer works to many types of recipients, including commissioning groups or patrons, friends, family, performers, and fellow composers.

Of course, not every dedication looks like a dedication. Some come encoded in titles, like John Cage’s For M.C. and D.T. (1952) or Conlon Nancarrow’s For Yoko (1980), some look like birthday presents, like Lou Harrison’s An Old Times Tune for Merce Cunningham’s 75th Birthday (1993) or Stucky’s Ai Due Amici for Esa-Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg (1998). Still others, including William Bolcom’s Three Dance Portraits (1986), whose movements are riddles connected to names of the composer’s friends, or many of Lou Harrison’s gamelan works, seem to be portraits, but function simultaneously as offerings, musical sketches given as gifts and cousins of the homage, which is again another form of non-dedication dedication.

 

Who reads dedications?

Most important to remember about this shape-shifting kind of gift is that it is a public one. There are many ways to honor a peer: one could sneak some sort of musical reference to him or her into the fabric of the piece, one could present a manuscript copy with a personal note, or one could even hide an inside joke in the title of a work. By contrast, the dedication represents a choice to make a very visible gesture. It becomes a prominent part of the text of the work, apparent to performers, and often spectators as well.

So who reads the dedication? The dedicatees of course, but also, well, you, as a member of the public audience. Who are you? Well, if you’re reading this article, then you are some sort of music consumer. You are probably involved with music in some way, as a composer, performer, or informed spectator, which means that you are at least periodically invested in the making of and listening to music. And in these activities, if you read scores for any purpose, then you’ve seen a dedication. Furthermore, particularly for those non-dedication dedications disguised as titles, you don’t even need to see a score (if there is one); you might learn of them in programs or elsewhere.

 

Why dedicate?

Dedications to patron-like figures were designed to acknowledge financial support, so why offer a piece to a non-paying figure, especially a peer? That’s a big question that one could fill a book trying to answer. Here are a few theories.

First, dedications have private or semi-private purposes; they are intended to communicate something, usually some species of gratitude, to their recipient. One common sentiment is the acknowledgement of teaching; many composers have offered works to mentors. One of the historically most discussed examples, for instance, is Beethoven’s dedication to Haydn, a gesture famous as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. It was common around 1800 for composers to label themselves as students when dedicating to a teacher, usually with a phrase like “student of x.” Beethoven, however, chose not to mark himself as a “student of Haydn,” a fact that, by some second-hand accounts, made Haydn uncomfortable, presumably because the lack of such a label seemed a denial of—or at least an ungrateful attitude towards—the composer’s mentorship.

In general, though, dedications to teachers do seem to communicate appreciation, and are usually offered fairly early in a composer’s career. Examples include: Schoenberg’s op. 1 lieder (1898) “to his teacher and friend,” Alexander Zemlinsky; Harold Shapero’s String Quartet (1941) to Walter Piston; David Lang’s Grind to a Halt (1996) to Jacob Druckman; and Ken Ueno’s Apmonia (2004) to Bernard Rands.

Apmonia dedication page, by Ken Ueno

Copyright © 2004 by New Jack Modernism. Used by Permission.

But dedications communicate to a public audience as well. First, they reveal biographical information and tell (or begin) stories about the dedicator. They entice the audience to investigate the relationship between the dedicator and dedicatee, whether there was one or not. Take Elgar’s op. 36 “Enigma” Variations. Dedicating the work “to my friends pictured within” and labeling each variation with initials and nicknames, Elgar tempts his audience to reconstruct his social circle. In fact, he may as well have titled them the “Please Solve Me Variations” given the speed and enthusiasm with which many of these riddles were deciphered. (Of course the central enigma, the theme of the work, remains unsolved.) Many other offerings are more overtly suggestive: Satie’s memorial Élégie for Debussy (1920) is explicitly marked in honor of “an admiring and pleasant friendship of thirty years.”

Most importantly, the dedication doesn’t only imply the existence of a relationship; it causes the audience to probe that relationship, searching for clues about the circumstances surrounding the offering itself. It’s like a sophisticated game of connect the dots, in which we see the outline of an interaction and are invited to fill in the details. That’s why the “Enigma” Variations are so irresistible; they openly activate our investigative instinct. And like most kinds of play, the dedicatory game is, on a deeper level, an empathic exercise, one wherein the reader imagines himself in the composer’s subjective space, attempting to envision the variety of scenarios that might have resulted in a personal or professional connection.

 

No really, why dedicate? (The cynical answer)

The fact that composer-to-composer dedications became common alongside the development of the modern musical economy is no mistake. Since the mid- to late 18th century, when they were decreasingly able to earn support from patrons, composers have had to find creative ways to appeal to a consuming public and to distinguish themselves in a marketplace increasingly crowded with their competitors’ wares. Some have used clever titles (much of Satie’s catalogue comes readily to mind), some have used unique instruments, perhaps in an attempt to jump early onto a bandwagon (such as the late-18th-century vogue for the glass harmonica or the mid-20th-century infatuation with the theremin); one could even argue that experiments with compositional techniques and form were in part an attempt to attract positive criticism, though that’s a leap that would require another article to justify.

This particular type of dedication was similarly designed to catch the consumer’s eye, as was especially evident in the 18th and 19th centuries when title pages were more crowded and elaborate. Today, dedications are printed almost exclusively on the first page of music in small print, whereas before approximately 1875, the dedicatee’s name rivaled that of the composer, as both appeared centrally on the title page in large and ornate script. Advertisements also often mentioned dedications, making this small bit of text even more likely to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions.

When Andreas Romberg, an early-19th-century violinist and composer, wrote to his publisher in 1801, his excited language pushed the promotional power of his dedication to Haydn: “This dedication will surely not be unappreciated by you, as it will doubtless promote the sale of the works.  Now tell me if we don’t understand our public—or rather, the world!” The dedication, Romberg boasts, would help sales and would reveal an unparalleled knowledge of the marketplace.

These days, dedications are rarely used in the service of publishers’ advertisements, but that doesn’t mean they go unnoticed. Cleverness will always attract attention, which is why witty dedications might endear the audience to their authors and thus serve an obliquely promotional purpose, whether intentional or not. It probably comes as no surprise that three eminent wordsmiths—Erik Satie, John Cage, and David Rakowski—boast a few such examples: “I dedicate this work to myself” reads the first page of Satie’s Prélude de La porte heroique du ciel (1894); Cage’s book Silence (1961) is “To Whom It May Concern,” and Rakowski’s piano etude no. 94, Knocksville (2010), is playfully dedicated “at” Harold Meltzer.

Knocksville, by David Rakowski

Copyright © 2010 by CF Peters Corporation. Used by permission.

But the claim of legacy constitutes a clearer and more common brand of self-promotion.

In 1854, for instance, Liszt offered his B-minor Sonata to Schumann, who was at that time a prominent composer in the Germanic tradition. Liszt, on the other hand, had not yet composed a sonata or any other type of work that would have been considered Beethovenian. The public offering to Schumann, therefore, would have signaled Liszt’s wish both to ally himself with this Teutonic tradition and to be validated by Schumann’s (or his disciples’) approval.

Particularly when a younger composer dedicates to a more established figure in this way, the implication of approval bleeds easily into one of influence. And what, after all, is more promotional in the music world than the claim of impressive professional associations? Is this not the reason for so much of the standard rhetoric in concert programs and website bios?

 

The “I” in Dedication

It may seem too cynical to suggest that composers manipulate the dedication, a seemingly intimate gesture, for financial gain. But whether or not we like to admit it, composers often need to be business people, and this involves, in part, crafting unique public personas as much as any other class of individuals with a public face: actors, television personalities, politicians (alright, maybe not as much as politicians).

Interestingly, one of the most important characteristics for a composer to project is that she is not a business person. After all, few consumers want to think of music as a commodity, a product engineered for success on the marketplace. That’s generally a buzz-kill for the musical experience.

The composer-to-composer dedication, it turns out, is a good antidote. An apparent window into the personal and professional interactions of its author, this kind of offering gives the consumer the impression that he or she is glimpsing an inner life, an authentic selfhood invested in friendships, mentorships, and overall sincerity. Moreover, it implies not a financial transaction, like a commission, but an aesthetic communion, one in which musical ideas and influence has been shared.

There is some evidence that composers themselves view their dedications in this way. Steven Stucky, for instance, suspects that his increased tendency to dedicate in recent years reflects an attitude “less formal and more personal.” Ingram Marshall has also characterized his offering of Vibrosuperball (1975) to John Adams as a “personal” one. For Ken Ueno, the inspiration is at once musical and intimately cooperative. “The Utopia, that is my imagination for what might be,” he says, “is expanded by new vistas revealed to me by what my most trusted virtuosic collaborators can make real.  The dedications to my pieces honor that history of collaboration.” Something similar is true for Rakowski. Many of his dedications honor those to whom he feels indebted for the concept or motivation for particular works, like piano etudes nos. 52, Moody’s Blues (2003), and 54, Pedal to the Metal (2003), both to Rick Moody, or 82, F This (2007), to Marilyn Nonken and Ueno.

So, if composers prefer to think of their dedications as private gestures between friends, and consumers tend to view them that way as well, why argue that they serve any other purpose? Because something more happens upon their reception. The composer’s public image changes. Consumers are drawn to contemplate a Venn diagram of affections and influences that may have affected the creation of the work.

This small bit of text packs a punch, then. It projects an image of a composer inspired by her peers, grateful for her friends, and indebted to her predecessors. It says, in its author’s voice, “I am true, I am genuine, I collaborate, I appreciate tradition.” And this is music to our eyes.

 

***

Emily Green

As an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, Emily H. Green is a musicologist on the faculty at the Department of Music at Yale University. Her work on dedications and musical consumerism has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Music and the Journal of Musicological Research. She is also active as a pianist and fortepianist.

Chicago’s EveryPeople Workshop Shapes Its Future with Inspiration from the Past

“What would this sound like if we did it?”

In just three years, the fledgling Chicago-based EveryPeople Workshop has asked this question about the jazz quartet, the big band, The Nutcracker, and the string quartet, and there is more to come. The EveryPeople Workshop is a collective arts organization formed by Mikel Avery with the assistance of Nick Gajewski and Nick Mazzarella to produce the original artistic work of its members and to build community through creativity.

In its early days, the EveryPeople Workshop was simply a band focusing on Avery’s music, but the vision was for the band to be just one of many projects presented by an organization that would sponsor work in many disciplines by many artists. Since then, EveryPeople has coalesced into a serious arts organization that distinguishes itself through an impressive variety of programming branching out from the jazz idiom, outreach to other Chicago non-profits, creative documentation of their work that serves as both marketing tool and artwork, and an adventurous do-it-yourself attitude that embraces bold experimentation while honoring tradition. The EveryPeople Workshop’s goals are ambitious, but as Gajewski says, “Whenever I work with EveryPeople, I know that I can believe one hundred percent in the quality of the work and commitment of the artists,” and this forms the foundation of a dynamic and hardworking collective.

EveryPeople is realizing its mission by creating ensembles involving over 18 musicians, running a festival in Woodstock, Illinois, and presenting a wide array of interdisciplinary programs—from the ballet Bronzeville Nutcracker to Avery’s EP Film + Trio project, featuring his original music and animated video with music for jazz trio. Starting out with the sweat equity of its own time and money, the organization hopes to evolve and grow, while developing more funding for these efforts through a mix of revenue from commissions, donations, grants, and ticket and recording sales. The Workshop’s plans for the future include 501c3 incorporation this year, and then finding its own space in Chicago.

The Workshop was born out of the founding members’ desire to play their own music on their own terms. Describing his way of realizing the Workshop’s goals, Avery says his fundamental concern is to “fully realize the inspiration” of his favorite musicians. One of these favorites, jazz pianist Bud Powell, is a major influence, but re-creating Powell’s music wouldn’t be enough. Avery feels the transmission isn’t complete until he has composed his own original music based on the inspiration of Powell’s music. “There won’t ever be an ‘EveryPeople Plays the Music of Billie Holliday’ show” Avery said, revealing a commitment to original music that has become the organization’s guiding principle. For an entirely self-taught composer, this was no insignificant decision.

From the beginning, the Workshop was meant to be a “platform for personal growth” and Avery has found this to be true in many, sometimes surprising, ways. In his EP Trio + Film project, Avery embraces the journey of personal discovery, becoming a video artist as well as a composer and drummer, where the integration of these three disciplines is a necessary part of the expression. Using his own combination of techniques to produce animated videos from his drawings, Avery’s film looks like his music sounds: the emphasis is on the vital energy of the moving shapes, rather than the details of their form.

Another core value of the EveryPeople Workshop is to foster a connection to the community around it. The collective seeks to honor the ideals of the Chicago artist and activist Oscar Brown Jr. who said, “An artist has a social responsibility to the community to not only entertain, but to educate.” To this end, EveryPeople has donated the first-year proceeds from its recordings to Chicago charitable organizations, produced fundraiser concerts, and brought its art to the public in unexpected ways in order to encourage people to realize their ambitions.

Some of EveryPeople’s projects have illuminated the history of Chicago’s residents. Avery’s Great Migration Suite, for the EP Ensemble, is based on an audio recording of an interview with Dr. Tim Black, a historian, activist, and professor emeritus at Chicago’s City College. In the piece, Black speaks about the culture and history of Chicago’s black population, and about how Chicago was affected by the great numbers of African-Americans who moved there in the early 20th century, eventually transforming it into a center of African-American culture. Like Ellington’s Sacred Concerts and the socially aware music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Great Migration Suite pairs new music with a historical perspective intended to show how today’s music is part of a long tradition of new music.

Another effort in this vein was the Bronzeville Nutcracker, a ballet featuring a new story related to the Tchaikovsky ballet and with original choreography by Lisa Johnson-Willingham, founder of the Willingham Project with music by Avery and Gajewski. The ballet’s main character, Peggy, a young girl living in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, wants an iPod for Christmas. To teach Peggy the lesson that non-material gifts can be much more profound, Peggy is given a rag-doll with a deep family tradition attached to it. The gift becomes not the object itself, but the bond to family and heritage to which the object provides a connection.

Documentation of the work is vital to the process of growth. To this end, EveryPeople has recorded a collective album featuring a variety of the organization’s ensembles every year since it started. The organization records its work in Avery’s apartment in Chicago, with just a few microphones. Like all recordings up until the advent of magnetic tape and multi-track recording technology, EveryPeople finds ways to get the sound it wants through experimentation with the placement of musicians around the microphone, simulating the gathering of musicians around a recording horn in the early days of jazz.

Nicholas Gajewski's strings record
“I got the idea from listening to some of my favorite albums that were recorded like this, especially a Bud Powell record that he recorded himself with just a reel-to-reel tape deck on top of the piano,” Avery recalled. These simple, old-fashioned recording techniques aren’t just economical. “I like the sound of the one-mic recordings. It works for our music. We can focus on the overall feeling without worrying about small details.”

EveryPeople honors its inspirations with a compositional style that Avery describes as “old-school with a twist”. For example, Avery’s “Topsy Turvy Smack” featuring vocalist Mary Lawson with the EP Ensemble on EveryPeople Workshop Vol. 2 sounds similar to any mainstream jazz recording from the 1950s through the ’60s, but is different in some important ways. Rather than a typical love song, Avery’s lyrics play with language, putting short adage-like bits of poetry through repeating permutations, letting them make their impact through rhythm rather than narrative. Mirroring the text, the music makes extensive use of repetition reminiscent of the riff-based tunes of Fletcher Henderson, but takes the approach further towards the territory of minimalism, or perhaps to hip-hop’s sampled beats. Avery incorporates his influences in a direct way, but takes them in his own direction.

This do-it-yourself approach to recording extends into the composition of new works as well. After their initial foray into ballet with Bronzeville Nutcracker, the workshop is planning a new ballet composed and directed by Nick Gajewski to be presented this year. In typical EveryPeople style, the choreography will be coming from the collective, by Avery and dancer Amanda Telischak. Though he’s not trained in ballet, Gajewski feels there’s no reason that should hold him back. “I love ballet, and I wanted to be in one. That was how it started,” he said, revealing pure, simple enthusiasm. Gajewski doesn’t see his inexperience as a ballet director as a disadvantage, but approaches the project from the perspective that “anyone with a eye for aesthetics” could do what he is doing. “As we work on the piece I’ll try to recreate what I’m seeing and hearing in my head with help from the company.” Gajewski said. Certainly this ballet will be different from one created by a veteran ballet company, but this is the kind of adventure for which EveryPeople is built: its committed core members will spend the long hours dealing with whatever problems arise, arriving at a production that only this group could have realized.

A vital part of any arts organization’s operations is to use whatever means at its disposal to help spread the word about the group’s creative work. As social media has allowed artists to perform this duty themselves, a multitude of approaches have come into play that reflect the incredible diversity of today’s arts scene. EveryPeople has created its own approach based on Avery’s idea of “personal growth through documentation” where the group “documents” rather than markets its work.

Through simple, yet creative videos posted on YouTube, EveryPeople offers a behind-the-scenes look at its projects. The videos are informal and are meant to show the simplicity of the recording sessions, or the personalities of the performers as they prepare for the performances. Other videos, though, are pieces in their own right that use material from the EveryPeople catalog, and go further with a new visual or a re-imagining of the musical material. In the video “EveryPeople Album Demonstration,” one piece from each group on the album Vol. 2 is re-created in unexpected ways: “Goats Go MMM Bluk Buk Buk Buk” is realized with a old-fashioned metronome and two glass bottles; “Topsy-Turvy Smack” is played by a tiny music box, with the fingers turning the small crank giving an idea of the scale of it. The videos document the projects, and sometimes stand on their own as well, expanding on the musical work done in performance and on recordings.

Another EveryPeople video collaboration features Timmy Johnson skateboarding through downtown Chicago performing tricks that are a typical of most skateboard videos. The difference is that the EP Ensemble’s music forms the soundtrack, and Avery and Gajewski appear in the video nearly as frequently as Johnson, sometimes recreating skateboard tricks as musicians might be expected: with the skateboard in their hands, feet on the ground and tongue firmly in cheek. The skateboard video forges an uncommon connection: what other jazz musicians have made a skateboard video? Importantly, the video doesn’t force the issue. Besides being a creative and entertaining video on its own, the video contributes to EveryPeople’s efforts to build community: skateboarders and jazz musicians may have thought they had little in common, but the world suddenly becomes a bit smaller as the two groups are connected.

Ethan Iverson, pianist of The Bad Plus, has often noted on his blog Do The Math that the most important innovations in jazz will be coming increasingly from groups rather than from individual soloists, as they generally have in the past. The efforts of the EveryPeople Workshop provides a look at why this might be the case. EveryPeople’s collective mentality is a model with less precedent in jazz, probably because of the individualistic nature of the music: most of the famous soloists of the jazz world have needed little other than a good rhythm section. This is an overstatement, but certainly the tradition in jazz—at least since the bebop era—has leaned towards a clear leader/side musician hierarchy in most groups.

The Workshop seems to draw its organizational inspiration more from dance or theater groups, where a single group puts on many diverse productions aligned with a single artistic vision, and Avery even uses the word “company” to refer to the group. EveryPeople is developing a different model that demonstrates a bold way forward for musicians looking to do original work in today’s diverse and changing arts scene.

The next big thing for the workshop is its third album, EveryPeople Workshop Vol. 3, released August 11, offering a cross-section of the group’s newest projects. The album features new pieces for Avery’s EP Trio + Film and Gajewski’s EP Strings, as well as the first recordings from the EP Big Band and Avery’s new EP Song project featuring vocalist Mary Lawson. About the new album, Avery said that the “original vision is coming into view even more” with the addition of guitarist Aaron Shapiro as a core member of the organization. Shapiro contributes one composition for the EP Big Band on this recording, and plays banjo/guitar on the entire album. Another step forward in the group’s journey, the album shows that as the EveryPeople Workshop decides what it wants to do, and how it wants to do it, learning new things, taking risks and pushing its artistic limits will be as important as producing a high-quality product. The EveryPeople Workshop feels that if it hasn’t done both, then it hasn’t done its job.

***

Douglas Detrick

Douglas Detrick is a trumpeter, composer, and music writer based in New York City. Having worked as a composer and performer in jazz, chamber, improvised, and electro-acoustic music, he is interested in the intersection of these forms and their resonance with our culture. Detrick has written for NewMusicBox, About.com, and for his own blog at douglasdetrick.com.

Reappraising Walter Piston

[Ed. Note: The following essay, in a slightly modified form, originally appeared in the program guide for a March 29, 2011, concert devoted to the music of Walter Piston by the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein at Carnegie Hall.—FJO]

Walter Piston

Walter Piston, from the Associated Music Publishers archives, courtesy G. Schirmer/AMP

There are few opportunities these days to hear live performances of the deeply felt, sonorously shaped music of the New England composer Walter Piston. His colleague and contemporary Aaron Copland called Piston “one of the most expert craftsmen American music can boast,” which has become a standard assessment. It has also boxed him in. While intended as a compliment, this appraisal suggests Piston to be something of a technocrat, a musician of the mind rather than the heart. This impression is far from the case. While Piston’s technical expertise is irrefutable, as Copland and others affirmed repeatedly over the years, he also had a soul, and he attained a depth of beauty that at times was breathtaking. Perhaps today’s re-engagement with tonality makes us ready to give this important mid-20th-century talent another chance.

Piston’s roots reflected a classic post-immigrant saga. Born in Rockland, Maine, he was the grandson of a seaman who made his way to Maine from Genoa in the mid-19th century. The family moved to Boston in 1905. They were “far from wealthy,” as Piston later acknowledged. He went to Mechanical Arts High School, where he trained as a draftsman, and he then attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School, where tuition was free. There he met his future wife, the artist Kathryn Nason (1892–1976). In 1919, Piston took Archibald Davison’s counterpoint class at Harvard, and Davison recognized his gifts immediately, arranging for him to enter as a fulltime student the following year, when Piston was 26. Upon graduating from Harvard, Piston won a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship and joined a pilgrimage of American composers to Paris and the studio of Nadia Boulanger. In 1926, Piston returned to Harvard as a member of the faculty, remaining until his retirement in 1960. Over the course of nearly four decades, he taught a distinguished series of future leaders among American composers, including Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Daniel Pinkham, Frederic Rzewski, and Harold Shapero.

With his longtime Ivy League association, Piston can seem like a composer of privilege. But at base he was a product of the American Dream—of upward social mobility through education and hard work. As his career developed, Piston identified with a cluster of intersecting composer networks. During the 1920s, his music occasionally appeared alongside that of Copland, Roger Sessions, and other young modernists in New York City. An equally crucial network emanated from Boston—not just from Harvard but also from a longtime association with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During Serge Koussevitzky’s directorship, Piston had a substantial series of premieres with the BSO. In an interview with the composer Peter Westergaard, Piston recalled vividly the impact of the Russian conductor, who joined the BSO in 1924:

When I returned from France I felt pretty gloomy about the situation of the composer in America. I knew conductors were not interested in what we composers were doing, so I was writing only chamber music…. Koussevitzky asked to see me. He asked, ‘Why you no write for orchestra?’ I said, ‘Because nobody would play it.’ And he said ‘Write, and I will play.’ So I wrote and he played.

The composer Mark DeVoto has rued Piston’s later fate with the BSO, which deteriorated after the directorship of Charles Munch (1949–62): “When Erich Leinsdorf and then William Steinberg followed Munch, Piston was essentially forgotten by the BSO, and his music was in eclipse nationally by the time of his death in 1976.” In fact, a recent search for “Walter Piston” in the Boston Globe online turned up far more hits for basketball games between the Detroit Pistons and Boston Celtics than for the city’s native-son composer.

Another influential strain in Piston’s career had to do with his work as “a progressive new theory teacher,” as his former student Elliott Carter put it. Ultimately Piston published four widely used textbooks: Principles of Harmonic Analysis (Boston, 1933), Harmony (New York, 1941), Counterpoint (New York, 1947), and Orchestration (New York, 1955). Harmony, revised and expanded by DeVoto, reached its 5th edition in 1987; in the 1950s it was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Like Roger Sessions, Piston was a determined internationalist, avoiding the “Americana” vogue that energized so many composers during the 1930s and 1940s. Piston emphatically identified as a trans-Atlantic musician, which he made clear in an interview with the British composer and scholar Wilfrid Mellers: “I would say that American backgrounds are the same as yours. I’m sure you would include in your background Italian music of the Renaissance, French music, German music; you should give us the right to include those in our backgrounds, because they are our artistic antecedents, and not only that, but our blood. I myself am one-fourth Italian.” Thus Piston strove to transcend national boundaries, aiming to write music that would take its place in a Euro-American cultural matrix.

Walter Piston’s 1937 Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, which was commissioned by the Columbia Broadcasting System as part of an initiative to inspire new works for radio, mimics a traditional three-movement concerto, and its clarity and wrong-note tonality reveal Piston’s early affinity with the neoclassical phase of Stravinsky. His first Violin Concerto was composed in 1939 and had its premiere in Carnegie Hall on March 18, 1940, by Boston-based violin virtuoso Ruth Posselt and the National Symphony Orchestra. Nearly an exact contemporary of Barber’s Violin Concerto, Piston’s work has been eclipsed by that more famous work. Piston’s Concerto uses a traditional three-movement form: Allegro energico, Andantino molto tranquillo, and Allegro con spirito. Piston fully understood the capacities of each orchestral instrument, and he made them sound their best—a bit like a fashion designer who brings out the personality and physical attributes of the person for whom a piece of clothing is intended. “I must say I’ve always composed music from the point of view of the performers,” Piston once declared. “I believe in the contribution of the player to the music as written. I am very old-fashioned that way.” Benjamin Britten recognized this skill, telling Copland at the premiere of the Violin Concerto that “there was no composer in England of Piston’s age who could turn out anything so expert.”

Walter Piston Piano Concertino, first page

The Symphony No. 2 (1943) has an unabashedly beautiful middle movement (Adagio) which is shaped as a resonant and meditative chorale, albeit with bluesy flourishes; its emotional warmth shows Piston to have had an aesthetic kinship with Samuel Barber. The symphony won a New York Critics Circle Award, and it enjoyed considerable success during WWII, with subsequent performances by the BSO, the NBC Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, among others. Writing in The New York Times after the Philharmonic-Symphony’s performance of the work in 1945, the critic Noel Straus put his finger on the central issue in Piston’s reception:

It has been generally conceded that no contemporary composer of this country surpasses, if any [even] equal, Mr. Piston in sheer technical skill. But all too often his output has been considered dry and academic. In this symphony he is again the master craftsman, while at the same time he managed to invest the content with a wealth of mood and meaning that defy any such censure.

Piston’s Symphony No. 4 was commissioned by the University of Minnesota for its centennial celebration and had its premiere on March 30, 1951, by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra), conducted by Antal Dorati. The work is in four movements, and Piston described it as being “melodic and expressive and perhaps nearer than my other works to the solution of the problem of balance between expression and formal design.” In other words, Piston understood his yin and yang, even though his prose descriptions tended towards the formalistic. As with Symphony No. 2 and the Violin Concerto, this symphony plugs into a Central European orchestral lineage, perhaps connecting most with Brahms. But the second movement (Ballando) doffs its hat to country fiddling, appearing as a response to works like Copland’s Rodeo. Perhaps this was Piston’s way of offering regional color in a commission from the Middle West.

Piston Symphony No. 4, p.130

From Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 4 , Copyright © 1953 by Associated Music Publishers (BMI) New York, NY. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

 

Ultimately, Piston wrote eight symphonies plus another 30-some works of various types for orchestra. He was almost exclusively a composer of instrumental fare.

Walter Piston's Signature

Image courtesy G. Schirmer/Associated Music Publishers

From the perspective of the early 21st century, the music of Walter Piston sounds mighty appealing. In the decades since his death, his reputation not only struggled because of his “conservative modernist style,” as his biographer Howard Pollack aptly defined it, but also because he was something of an “introvert,” as Pollack also observed. Piston expressed himself eloquently in music, but in prose he was largely pragmatic, offering few power-adjectives for those who might want to market his music.

Yet others found ways to articulate the cultural status of Piston’s compositions. Writing in 1946, Elliott Carter zeroed in on the main issues that held Piston back, yet he predicted a rosy future:

Through the years when the ‘avant-garde’ moderns were busy exploring fantastic new sounds and sequences, …through the early thirties when a new wave of nationalism and populism startled many into thinking that the concert hall with its museum atmosphere was finished as a place for living new music, down to the present more conservative situation, Piston went his own way. He stood firmly on his own chosen ground, building up a style that is a synthesis of most of the important characteristics of contemporary music and assimilating into his own manner the various changes as they came along. . . . His works have a uniform excellence that seems destined to give them an important position in the musical repertory.

Maybe Piston’s moment has arrived.

***

Carol J. Oja is the William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. Among her many books, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.

Lossy vs. Lousy Sound

name

One late evening while visiting a dear friend, he presented a disturbing issue. He owns an upscale men’s clothing store on Market Street in San Francisco and playing on his sound system all day long are an assortment of employee contributions supplied by their individual mp3 players. He indicated that it was very convenient and they all get a fair share of what they like because they simply swap out their players and plug in. Happy with the new arrangement, he began to notice over a period of a few months that there was something strange about how he experienced the quality of the music. This was especially true for him if he was in the store for more than a few hours at a time. He had a difficult time describing the feeling, but it wasn’t pleasant. He also mentioned that after those periods of time, when coming home, the sound around him as well as the quality of his personal systems at home sounded a bit strange.

He asked me to stop by the store and analyze the sound system to see if there was a problem in the setup or possibly the wiring, but as I questioned further, I knew the problem all too well. I asked him what devices were used. These were invariably cell phones or other portable players and they were all utilizing files that were compressed. They were all mp3s! With the official publication and release of the mp3 audio layer in 1993, the intention was to faithfully reproduce the original sound quality of the recordings while at the same time reducing the data size significantly. This process of compressing the file using algorithmic methods would isolate elements of perception and hopefully, for most people, the degradation wouldn’t be noticed. Certainly the cost of data space was an issue. In 1956, IBM reported the cost of 5 megabytes of space to be $50,000.00. Fast forward to September of 1990 the cost had dropped to $9.00.For a full CD quality sound file at just over 10 megabytes per minute, a full CD of music at this rate would be obviously impossible to efficiently capture. So the efforts of reducing file size were certainly justified to allow the computer to be an audio player.

Portability was the next step in the evolution of listening. The earlier models of portable mp3 players offered up to 32 megabytes. Today an average player holds 160 GIGABYTES of storage. At a typical mp3 compression rate, this translates into carrying 40,000 tracks of the pop-song length of 3 minutes or roughly 2,000 full-length CDs. Surely we need to be carrying this much music on our morning commutes! It has clearly become congruent with all topics relating to attention span and more importantly, the lack of intimacy we previously had in the days of the vinyl long playing record. I remember the days of bringing a new album home in my youth, caressing the 12-inch cover, reading the liner notes and listening to it repeatedly, learning every gesture and every musical phrase. I often wonder how many of us have this type of relationship with recorded music now. I’ve heard stories about record labels offering their entire catalog on a packaged flash drive. Imagine the question from a friend when asking what you have on your device and unabashedly answering something to the effect of “everything that’s ever been recorded.” Although not impossible, the shame of having it “all” but at a quality unworthy of the potential our ears have to hear it would be hardly worth it.

Without entering the subject of distribution of music and the financial woes of those who create it, the issue of how it enters our ears has become a concern that may shed light on the experiential degradation of our current listening habits. Streaming media does become important due to the ease of accessing music while browsing and the quality of this medium is also a factor. The typical default streaming rate is half of the quality of the average mp3 download: 32 kbps for AM quality, 64 kbps for FM quality, 1,411.2kbps is the quality of conventional CD digital audio or Linear PCM (pulse code modulation). The higher number indicates more information per second. More information translates into more data and therefore, more aural events and frequencies that are offered to our ears. In the upcoming months most companies are converting to a streaming metaphor for track delivery so the trend of maintaining poor quality seems to be a permanent solution. Most radio stations of stature are offering the choice to stream at all of the quality levels mentioned above, but the highest level offered is commonly 128 kbps. If the streaming is done on a mobile device using Wifi, this bit rate could also be achieved. If using 3G or Edge networks, the average will automatically be reduced to 32 kbps! Even having the best rate is in my opinion the worst. It’s O.K. for NPR talk shows, but we ARE talking about music here.

In the following example, a short orchestral excerpt is analyzed to show the distinction between a full CD quality file and a typical mp3 file at 128 kbps.

Figure 1 shows a visual representation of the relative presence of pitches that are produced by the sound sample horizontally over time in the form of a spectrogram at full CD quality. The lower frequencies are on the bottom rising higher to the top. Figure 2 shows the same data compressed as an mp3 at 128 kbps. The first thing that should be obviously clear is that an mp3 at the 128 kbps rate slams the door on all frequencies above approximately 15,000Hz. A bad haircut indeed! Since the human ear can perceive pitches between 20 to 20,000 Hz, which is a range of 10 octaves, our aural potential is already losing a tremendous amount of data. This fact is further amplified by not only the loss of fundamental notes of each instrument, but the paramount alarm is that the spectral data or overtones of each note by each instrument are brutally and insensitively sacrificed. The highest pitches in the orchestral ensemble can be as high as 4,400 Hz, yet when these high pitches sound, their spectral series can reach beyond 15K Hz. With mp3 compression, this range of color is lost. Furthermore, the notes of the lower pitched instruments which produce a set of overtones reaching our aural limit, even though are less in amplitude are missing as well. This is what we refer to as color, warmth or presence. In commercial terms: full quality. In the sound examples below, I offer an example of full quality, mp3 quality at 128 kbps, and also an example isolating what is missing from the full quality. While the example of what is missing may not sound like music, it is essential to the full experience. It would be likened to creating the perfect soufflé while forgetting the subtle spices for the full emotionally charged culinary delight or perhaps like drinking wine out of a box.

name

Figure 1: Conventional CD quality. A full spectrum of sound.

 

name

Figure 2: OTSample mp3 at 128 kbps. The missing sound is obvious.

 

Everything above 15kHz is gone.

To fully appreciate the importance of this loss, consider the reason a clarinet sounds different than an oboe being not only due to timbre and color, but that it offers unique spectral differences. When listening to sound sample 3—which contains “what is missing”—you can hear a complex and thick texture of high pitches. Don’t be fooled by thinking that missing this as trivial or unimportant. These are the exact sounds that fill up the richness of the full-quality sound in context. Whether you bask in the warmth of a Sinatra standard or luxuriate in the lush textures of a Lindberg orchestral piece, the full spectrum of sound fed through the compression encoders will leave a lifeless and empty version of what could be a massively potential explosion of color and richness. The trouble is that being habitual by nature, we get used to things and as we were successfully seduced into the convenience of portability, quick downloads, and streaming media. We are definitely capable of distinguishing the capabilities of our ears. Put simply, the result of the compressed audio is not the same as the original sound file. The scientific desire is to make the difference of the two imperceptible by altering the errors such that we fool our senses by psychoacoustics and after enough repetition, we stop noticing the difference. This manipulative type of indoctrination does have a cost.

There are countless studies about the damage we are doing to our ears by listening with headphones at loud levels for extended periods of time. This poses a concern about the premature degradation of young people’s ears which will obviously lead to hearing loss earlier than normal. The concern of the musician, composer, or anyone serious about listening should be more about what our ears can no longer distinguish. Many others such as my friend at the clothing store report to me that compressed music makes them tired. More scientific studies are on the horizon, but surely the psychoacoustic algorithms used to reduce file size are responsible. Surely the intentions were never to protect quality and performance. Surely we are being forced into a Procrustean bed arbitrarily to satisfy the needs of the expanding market and the exaggerated availability of music that we could never have the time to be intimate with or understand deeply. Finally, 5 megabytes of data no longer sets us back $50,000.00. Western Digital published in August of this year a cost of 8.21 cents per gigabyte of storage. To put that into perspective: $82.10 for a terabyte of data storage. Certainly we can transform and return to full quality. The question is and will always be dependent on the questionable demands of the consumer versus the habitual laziness of the patterning we are accustomed to.

It is possible to invest in higher quality versions of lossless compression models and spend time doing conversions and cataloging. My feeling is that the time is ripe for the simplification of maintaining the highest quality possible. It encourages artistic and financial justice to those who created the music and a respectful integrity as well.

The final insult to this reduction of aural experience are the devices which we use to listen to compressed audio. As we load the numerous sound files onto our portable devices, they in turn, sub-define a discreet approximation of the pitches used to get the sound that is converted from the sound file itself to get into our ears. The heart of the matter is protecting the frequency response from point A to point B. Without posting a product comparison, know that there are differences in the test results and they vary a great deal. Before committing to purchasing a player, know and understand at least these three things: the signal to noise ratio deviation or (SNR), the total harmonic distortion or (THD+N) and the maximum power output coupled with stereo crosstalk. Compensating with expensive headphones or earbuds, might give an illusion that life is better, but in the end what you put into a device, you will certainly get out of it.

The seduction of technology and product evolution can be extremely powerful and at times overbearing. Updating software is a testament to this. Many feel that they spend the majority of their productive hours on their machines learning them rather than actually doing their work. A new feature keeps consumers impressed even if it may not contribute to an insistent and constant work flow. Our ears, however, seem a priceless set of receptors carrying us forward into a lifelong relationship of outer phenomena into an inner experience.

***

name

True Rosaschi

True Rosaschi is a New York-based composer, teacher, theorist and technologist. He is interested in the crossroads of music and intercultural/postmodern theory, improvisation, electroacoustic music and teaching music to adults as a transformative process. He has been a student of Alvin Curran, Fred Frith and Pauline Oliveros. In 2005 with Oliveros, he created a live-networked performance from Vilnius in real time to New York. Rosaschi continues to lecture and perform throughout Europe and the United States.

Response to Noah Weber’s Comments on Emily Howell

name

I want to thank Noah Weber for his thoughtful comments on Emily Howell’s music. My thanks to Weber may seem strange given the overall negative tone of his review. However, I greatly appreciate people who carefully listen and study the music they evaluate regardless of their ultimate findings. Rather than take each of Weber’s ideas in turn, I here group them according to common themes. I hope this does not present problems for readers in making connections between my clarifications and his points.

Weber defines language as syntax and grammar which I find redundant. Language is a combination of syntax (nouns, verbs, etc. in their proper order) and semantics (the meanings of these words). That music has syntax is undeniable. We have hundreds of years of proof in both classical and popular genres. That music contains semantics is less clear. In language we have dictionaries with clear meanings of words. In music, not so. Certainly the use of musical allusions such as “Dies Irae” and other quotations indicate vague meanings. However, I know of only a few attempts (see Cooke’s The Language of Music or the synthetic language Sol-re-sol) at creating dictionaries of meanings of musical ideas. And these musical dictionaries are necessarily incomplete, not to mention that no one I am aware of consults them. Therefore, music is half a language, the syntax half, with communication—the sending and receiving of an intended message—minimal at best. Words seem inadequate enough without resorting to melodies and harmonies as alternatives. Further, much of the magic of music, for me at least, rests in its ephemeral qualities. That we can hear the same work and each derive a different message and pleasure from it is part of music’s charm. Thus, intent on the composer’s part rests in getting the notes right, not in conveying some hidden message.

I have never claimed that Emmy has passed any kind of Turing test as Weber claims. In fact, while I greatly respect Alan Turing and his work, I don’t believe his test truly identifies intelligence. For example, what credentials does the individual judging have? Can he or she really tell the difference between intelligence and non-intelligence? As far as I know, no one has ever defined intelligence in a way that we can all agree upon. Without a complete notion of “I”, how can we have “A.I.”? What I have claimed is that Emily Howell has passed a test for artificial creativity, and I devote quite a number of pages to this in my book, Computer Models of Musical Creativity (MIT Press, 2006).

In reference to the story Weber finds problematic, his source (a popular journal) got it wrong. Here’s the correct version. After a performance of Emily Howell’s Opus 1 for two pianos, a non-music professor—who has a musical background—mentioned to my wife (one of the performers) that Howell’s piece was incredibly moving and the best work on the program. My wife, not me, had ‘advertently’ left out any information in the program notes about Emily being a computer program. Roughly six months later, this same audience member attended a lecture of mine on computer-composed music where I played the same Opus 1 via CD. On this occasion, not having made the connection between the two events, this professor claimed he could immediately tell what he’d heard was computer composed because it was cold and emotionless.

I will resist discussing either Weber’s prostitute metaphor or his references to eHarmony, iTunes, and so on. I simply don’t know enough about how any of these relate to Emily Howell to comment. However, the question of who owns Emily’s intellectual property rights should be clear. I do. I created the program. I interact with her as audience during the composition of new works. I decide if a new work is interesting enough to perform or record. The same is true of Emmy’s output, all the scores of which state “By David Cope with Experiments in Musical Intelligence.” I might also note that the reason for my programs only creating works by living composers in Cope style results from a reluctance to face the possible litigation that might follow.

Regarding the problems which Weber has detected in comparing the score of Land of Stone to the CD of same, recording is an extremely complex process. Between composer and listener are several layers of individuals that many may not know much about. Performers, conductors, producers, recording engineers, and editors come to mind. Each plays an important role in making a recording. The producer, for example, listens during the recording sessions to determine when the music is “in the can,” that is when all the notes are covered correctly in at least one of the “takes.” The recording engineer controls the mixing board and decides the balance between instruments. The editor decides which take works best and how to edit it into the takes of the music on either side of it. For Land of Stone, I had limited funds for the entire project. This meant limited time for each aspect. In the end, nothing works perfectly. Mistakes creep in during recording, especially when certain performers just don’t get it. Thus, substitutions can occur at the last minute. Often certain measures aren’t really in the can and a composer or editor may have to make a choice between releasing a recording with a bad reading of a passage or just cutting it. In short, and especially with new music, score and recording don’t always match. In fact, in my experience, they rarely match. My aesthetics, however, at least in terms of composition, do not play a role in making these changes.

Per Weber’s suggestion, I visited noahsweber.com/supplement using two different browsers, but could not access his materials. I presume he is waiting until publication of his critique before posting the information. Thus, I cannot comment on the particulars. I will add, however, that the note for the contrabass that he states is out of range is not out of range. As a professional contrabassist for many years, I can play it and so can most of the bassists I know.

I wish that Weber had read Computer Models of Musical Creativity rather than continually quoting from the popular press. In my book he would have found that I am very much involved in Emily Howell’s composing process. I am “her” audience so to speak. Without going into details, I “carrot and stick” her through the composing process. Works do not appear at the “push of a button.” Though my input does not ever give predictable results, it does nudge Emily’s output more towards what I prefer. All this occurs long before the score exits the printer. Since this process is presented in detail in a number of sources, I am a bit surprised at Weber’s lack of knowledge on this point. I also feel humans compose using trial and error. Beethoven’s sketchbooks represent a perfect example of this.

Weber comments on the effects my work may have on living composers citing an article by Milton Babbitt. Interestingly Babbitt, who died recently, did not title his “Who Cares if You Listen?” The editors did that in order to create controversy and sell more copies of their magazine. Without his permission I might add. The title is an oft quoted source for his supposed belief in music created solely by science. I suggest that anyone interested in this subject read the article before judging it on its title alone. Babbitt makes quite legitimate arguments for a different way of looking at and listening to music.

I have heard the words “truly original music” many times over the years. They’re often used to suggest that humans, as opposed to anything non-human, have the ability to pull rabbits out of hats by developing completely new things, when in fact, we humans are, like everything else in the universe, combining and recombining already extant things to produce new and original things. I created a free program (again see Computer Models of Musical Creativity) that identifies sources of music touted to be “truly” original. For example, the so-called Tristan chord, supposedly originated by Wagner, existed long before him with roots in Beethoven, Liszt, and others and of whose music Wagner was fully aware. Spohr, for example, wrote an earlier opera that begins so similarly to Tristan that it’s difficult to believe that Wagner didn’t lift his music directly from that work.

Beneath a lot of what Weber says about Emily Howell rests this notion of humans versus machines. I find it confusing that when we use computers for bookkeeping, Internet shopping, email, and so forth, it’s called a tool. But when some people use computers for creative work, computers suddenly become beings in their own right, apparently operating as something far greater than tools. This is nonsense, of course. Computers and all the software running on them were and are created by humans. Computers simply provide the same speed and accuracy they do for bookkeeping, Internet shopping, email, and so forth. The only thing computers do is carry out instructions. The fact that I cannot predict what my program’s outcomes will be is not because my program has a mind of its own, but that its computations are so fast and complex that I can’t keep up with it. This is true of all computers everywhere. No computer anywhere operates independently of its creators and users.

I like the word “algorithm” because it existed long before computers and makes clearer the idea of computers as tools. Algorithms are recipes, sets of rules designed to reach some kind of desired result. Beethoven used algorithms limiting his harmonic vocabulary, his orchestration, his form, and so on. We all use algorithms. DNA is an algorithm. The only difference between Beethoven’s algorithms and a composer who uses computer algorithms is that Beethoven used software and computer composers use both software and hardware. I could have produced all the output of my computer programs were I to have the time, patience, and accuracy necessary to do so. I don’t. It would have taken me several lifetimes.

Weber claims—through another popular press quotation—that I am “audacious.” I think he would not find me so audacious if he’d read Computer Models of Musical Creativity. Emily Howell’s creative process is actually quite simple. She does not respond to “hoots and hollers,” but keyboard input. Weber asks, “Is there nothing to stop Emily Howell from churning out soulless, conformist tripe?” Again I suggest that recombination is a powerful process. “Churning out?” Well, I suppose one could call it that, though as I discuss in my books and articles, it takes a great deal of time and effort to produce the resultant music. “Soulless?” Well, I’m glad that someone knows what soul is. I surely don’t. Maybe Weber can enlighten me. For example, where exactly is soul located? Do only humans have souls? As for “conformist,” I don’t think that recombining groups of music necessarily conforms to anything. For example, sulfur and carbon are relatively simple elements. Potassium nitrate a compound. Mixed together in the proper proportion (10% sulphur, 15% carbon, and 75% potassium nitrate) forms gunpowder. Otherwise the ingredients remain inert. Mixing the ingredients just right produces the lethal “new” combination.

Finally, let me respond to a number of quotes from Weber’s critique. To begin, “She is nothing but a computer program.” This statement suggests that Weber imagines computer programs to be relatively worthless things, even though they pervade most of our lives in critically important ways. Weber states that I insinuate that “academia is reluctant to acknowledge my brilliance.” To the contrary, I feel that my many writings on the subject indicate the opposite, at least in regard to “my brilliance.” I have no idea what importance, if any, my work has or will have in the future. I am definitely passionate about it, but at the same time cautious in my claims. Weber argues that Emily has an “inability to ever truly create original works.” My previous comments regarding gunpowder relate to this. But as further testimony to the lack of validity of his statement, most scientists would argue that recombinance represents the core of originality. The pressures exerted during the Big Bang produced oxygen from the combination of hydrogen and helium. For that matter, every other element and compound in our universe results from the same processes. I previously mentioned DNA, but I’ll add here that each human being begins with genetic recombination during crossover. In short, recombination represents one, if not the sole source of originality we know of, and is the core of all my programs. I suppose I should be dismayed by Weber’s final comment that, in essence, I have spent the last thirty-one years of my life creating “little more than novelties . . . dwarfed by their potential negative consequences.” I hope he will not be too disappointed to learn that I am just now beginning a recording of Opus 4 and soon thereafter opera 5 and 6 for the next CD of Emily Howell’s music.

Again, I thank Weber for his critique of Emily Howell. Few people have taken the time to ponder the concerns he has so articulately stated. If they had, maybe more dialog would take place over what I think are important issues. Because of his work, this now may occur.

***

name
David Cope

David Cope is Dickerson Emeriti Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he teaches theory and composition. His over seventy published compositions have received thousands of performances throughout the U.S. and abroad, including those by the Vermont, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cabrillo Festival, and Santa Cruz Symphony Orchestras, as well as numerous university orchestras and wind ensembles. His books Computers and Musical Style, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, The Algorithmic Composer, Virtual Music, and Computer Models of Musical Creativity, describe the computer program Experiments in Musical Intelligence, created by Cope in 1981, which functions by inheriting a composer’s style and then composing new music in that style.

Emily Doesn’t Care If You Listen

name

“Cope remembered that Bach wasn’t a machine—once in a while, he broke his rules for the sake of aesthetics. The program didn’t break any rules; Cope hadn’t asked it to.”

—Ryan Blitstein, “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer,” Miller-McCune, February 22, 2010.

Technology evolves at such a fast pace that it is often difficult to discuss a new innovation critically without fearing that the argument will be anachronistic before the discussion is even complete. Yet we must consider the software and hardware around us as they relate directly to the moment we live in, for any attempts at trying to write about the evolution or limitations of the technology of the future is a folly. To date, there is very little by way of critical analysis of David Cope’s computer programs “Emmy” and “Emily Howell” outside of the relatively esoteric field of research into artificial intelligence, and thus I hope to offer one as best as 2011 will allow.

Emmy (a play on EMI—Experiments in Musical Intelligence) is software, capable of creating original music when given certain parameters. If Bach’s six Brandenburg Concerti are uploaded into the program, a new work “in the style” of the Concerti will appear. If Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony are synthesized by Emmy, a work of distinctly late 19th-century Vienna will be produced. As a strong proponent of computer sciences as they relate to music, Cope felt the desire to go further with artificially intelligent composition and put aside the program that merely synthesized the works of previous composers to create a new, dynamic platform, “Emily Howell.” Emily only uses musical sources produced by Emmy, which include everything from Navajo Songs to Mahler, and (officially) the only living composer whose work is present in the database is Cope’s.

The implications of these programs are tremendous. For musicians and audiences alike, the progress and even nature of music could be fundamentally changed. If a computer program could create new music with the push of a button, customizable to anyone’s taste and without distinct intellectual copyright issues, it would revolutionize the way music is produced and consumed in everyday life.

Yet there are technical, philosophical, and practical issues which must be considered when weighing the value of Emmy and Emily Howell in society. How does Emily potentially affect music from the perspectives of composers, performers, computer programmers, classical music fans, and the general public? Does Emily live up to Cope’s claims regarding Howell’s capacity?

What is Music? The answer might seem obvious, but it is important to define what music is before it can properly be discussed. Leonard Bernstein argued in his 1973 Norton Lectures (later titled The Unanswered Question) that based upon Noam Chomsky’s analysis of languages, syntax, and grammar, music functions as a language. By extension, it suggests that music is just a root—as the Phoenician and Cyrillic alphabets offer basic structures for languages to be built, so can music be parsed in various ways to offer many languages. Thus music is not a universal language. Contrary to romantic notions that music transcends nation, culture, and status, any Western listener who has ever sat down to traditional Tibetan chants can attest that what one culture considers sacred, another would consider cacophonous. Tritones (and their surrounding microtones) are considered harmonious in many of these musical languages, while Western classical music referred to the tritone as “the Devil’s Interval” for a significant period of time—not only unpleasant but, by association, immoral.

Languages also inherently evolve over time; while Chaucer wrote in “English,” it is virtually unintelligible to the modern speaker. A mid-point can be seen in Shakespeare—certainly understandable to an English speaker, but syntactically far removed from our present language. Each musical language evolves as well. During the Renaissance, Western classical music revolved around modal harmonies, with the Ionian and Aeolian (major and minor) scales rarely used. From the Baroque until midway through the Romantic Period, Ionian and Aeolian (tonal) harmonies were the principal musical dialects. Toward the end of the Romantic period, tonal harmony began to disintegrate and a slew of new harmonic structures were used. Music then can be said not only to function as a language, but to evolve as one as well. While not immediately capable of relaying concrete ideas (i.e. “Go take out the garbage!”), it is nonetheless a form of communication: A poetic communication, with grammatical and syntactical rules guiding its usage and comprehensibility as the language evolves.

Ultimately, the discussion involves intention. A language is a collection of sounds, organized into roots, expanded into words, and then governed by grammar to take otherwise incoherent tones and give them meaning. Neither “hjew wejklf jjeih” nor “anatomical shelf run quarry” conveys anything, because they are not following the basic rules of the language used to write this essay. Is a birdcall music or literal language? To a bird, it communicates a specific idea (danger, mating, etc.) and thus should be considered a literal language. The average human lacks the ability to understand the intended message, yet we can reconceive it and render it into a musical concept. A powerful and congruent example of this can be seen in Olivier Messiaen’s fascination with birds and his usage of their songs in music and ornithography. He spent a significant portion of his life cataloging birdcalls, using musical notation only as a medium for documentation. Yet in the composition of his Quartet for the End of Time, he utilizes birdcalls interpretively, using the free harmonic language of the nightingale to conjure an image of an Eden-like heaven. In doing so, he removes the literal meaning of the birdcalls for the picture he is painting in tones—and it becomes music.

As we relate this back to computers attempting to communicate, why aren’t there any computers creating works of literature, either in the style of a specific author or in their own, unique style? Would the general public want to consume a book written by a computer? Would it have any substance?

At the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, scientists have made a noble attempt. Their program, “Brutus,” can produce simple stories, based upon certain paradigms of contemporary struggle and conflict. The researchers state:

We use Brutus.1 in support of our philosophy of Weak Artificial Intelligence—basically, the view that computers will never be genuinely conscious, but computers can be cleverly programmed to “appear” to be, in this case, literarily creative.

(—From the website for Brutus;
examples of the literary output can also be read there.)

While it is fascinating to observe a computer able to use algorithms to analyze the basic elements of human interaction and mimic them, the end result is, at least at this time in computer development, lacking in the originality of insight into a human issue. A computer can only generate responses based upon previously programmed ideas. This “Weak Artificial Intelligence” can only mimic the process of learning—its ability to learn is confined to the parameters it already understands. Profound literature is created through a unique perspective, conveyed through language in a way that resonates with readers. By definition, a computer cannot have a unique perspective or original idea until it is able to achieve true artificial intelligence—specifically, self-awareness.

name

So why then has Emily Howell gained a certain amount of popular acceptance through live performances and record sales while her literary counterpart remains an academic novelty?

Music is mystical. Or more appropriately, its composition is romanticized. Most people “compose” text on a daily basis, whether for mundane or creative purposes. Comparatively few compose music so prolifically. Improvisational music can be viewed as the one field of composition that captures the same freedom and immediacy in the use of a musical language, but it requires a certain amount of training, both in the grammar of a musical language and in the technical execution required to perform it on an instrument. So the composition of music is left to “talented” or “gifted” individuals, while the majority of society remains content simply to consume the products. This is where the Turing Test becomes a significant factor.

In 1950, the English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a test for determining true artificial intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen. To date, no computer has won the Loebner Grand Prize, an ongoing challenge for a computer to pass the Turing Test. (There is an annual prize for the computer “which is most indistinguishable from a human,” thus attempts are regularly made.)

The most popular story about Emily Howell suggests that she does indeed pass the Turing Test. A 2009 article by Murad Ahmed published in The Times (London), offers an un-cited and un-attributed anecdote from Cope about a professor who came to him a break in the middle of a lecture performance at UC Santa Cruz, where both professors teach. After the piece was played, the “professor came to me and said this was one of the most beautiful pieces he’d heard in a long time.” Then, after listening to the lecture and learning that it was written by a computer, he was reported to have said, “From the minute it started I could tell it was computer-composed. It has no guts, no emotion, no soul.”

Cope’s anecdote extends the parameters of the Turing Test to music, offers that Emily has passed it, and implies that academia is reluctant to acknowledge his brilliant discovery. Yet looking more carefully at his statement, a serious question of judgment arises. Who was this professor? The reader is lead to believe that he is a professor of music—otherwise why mention his status within the school. More importantly, why would this “professor,” who presumably knew Cope’s work, go to a lecture recital, feel inclined to make such strong statements in support of the work, only to make a contradictory statement, insulting Cope’s achievement, shortly after?

There is no question that Cope, in devoting himself to his science, has anthropomorphized Emily and is fighting to gain recognition for her1, but to what extent? Music is a poetic, interpretive language, not a literal one, thus the standards for the Turing Test cannot be directly applied. Many works by living composers, such as Pierre Boulez’s Structures 1a, would more readily be accepted as the music of computers than Howell’s, but the intention behind Structures 1a was to give way to an intricately conceived, emotionless canvas. As an academic deeply involved in the world of artificial intelligence (he has written seven books and twenty articles on the subject of music as it relates to computers, with three of the books and nine of the articles dealing specifically with AI, as well as a creator of Artificial Intelligence Poetry Program), Cope’s attempts to suggest that computer music can be judged by the Turing Test don’t adequately consider the basic elements of the test as they relate to musical languages, as well as the limitations of the linguistic test itself.2

In many ways, this conversation is directed towards the producers of music—both the composers and the performers who devote their lives to the creation of music. Emily Howell is an extension of the iTunes “Genius Function,” and the “Personalized Recommendations” function utilized by Netflix, Amazon.com, Pandora, and a host of other media outlets that try to predict human desires to increase sales. Most consumers of this media appreciate the “Personalized” results, as it offers them suggestions as to what they will want to purchase next, giving them something new without straying too far from what they already know. The popular dating site eHarmony.com acknowledges the limitations of its algorithm, and after a 30-minute personality test, informs as many as twenty percent of its potential clients that they do not fall into a specific category, and are thus “unmatchable.”3 While this might be disheartening to a single individual in search of love, it suggests that human preferences cannot be simply reduced to a series of parameters.

As producers of music, it is important to understand the limitations of assuming that groupings or categories of sounds will elicit specific emotions. While a minor key often implies a more somber mood in Western classical music (obviously with exceptions), the effective usage of a key is different from composer to composer and piece to piece. At this moment, artificial intelligence cannot understand the subtle gradients, or their reception without a human intermediary.

Emily Howell has proved effective at mimicking a composer fairly well. The entire project was created when David Cope, struggling to complete an opera commission, designed a program that understood his music idioms, tendencies, and syntax, and then produced new material in his style. He used this basic material as a guideline to complete the opera. After this, Cope began to expand the parameters, inputting works of other composers into Emmy, trying to create a program that would offer something as authentic as the original. The idea itself was not new—Fritz Kreisler performed many “lost” works of the baroque era, only to later reveal that they were of his own pen, and Remo Giazotto used the bombing of Dresden to “uncover” several works “by Albinoni,” most famously the Adagio in G Minor. Yet there is a notable difference: while Kreisler and Giazotto were able to pass off the works as originals because of their fame, closer analysis of the works show distinct signs of musical influences other than the supposed original composer. Emmy’s output proved to be mediocre examples of the original composer, with no uncharacteristic elements, but also none of the “brilliance.” In the section of his website devoted to “Experiments in Musical Intelligence,” Cope describes Emmy’s process as:

(1) deconstruction (analyze and separate into parts)
(2) signatures (commonality – retain that which signifies style)
(3) compatibility (recombinancy – recombine into new works)

This process created a composite of the functional norms, and by his own admission, the results were rather uninspiring.

In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud described the creative process as “the suspension of rational principles.” A computer can create an infinite number of random possibilities, but the concept of suspended rationality has yet to be attainted by a computer. As Cope explains in “Experiments in Musical Intelligence,” it was the lack of “errors,” or intentional breaking of the rules, that made Emmy’s work plastic. As nuanced as the programming can be, the difference between irrational and random (or intentional breaking of the rules for an aesthetic reason versus arbitrary straying because a certain amount of unpredictability is required) is what separates creation from amalgamation.

There is no question that musical borrowing and referential passages play a significant role in composition. The Western classical tradition teaches composition through the study of the canon. Nadia Boulanger, the famous compositional pedagogue, explored a new composer each week with her class, analyzing pieces of the composer and then requiring her students to write a piece in that composer’s style. Yet, as Igor Stravinsky famously remarked, “A bad composer borrows, a good composer steals.” This suggests that to be influenced by another, one cannot simply break down the process and imitate, but must incorporate it into their own personal language. Boulanger’s methodology taught her students to understand the creative process of historical figures to enrich their vocabulary—teaching them grammar that they would then mold into their own voices—as seen in the multifarious careers of her pupils (Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass, etc.). But Emily cannot generate her own style, because, as limited by a lack of self, she cannot interpret the works of others; she can only analyze them.4

There is something to be said for the sheer technical achievement that is Emily Howell. In a way, she is a work of art. From the technical perspective, she is on par with the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence currently in production, and more so because her product can mimic “human” music to the extent that listeners don’t assume that it is computer music. Yet having had the opportunity to review two scores (of six total works) by Emily Howell and compare them to the official recordings supervised by David Cope, I stumbled upon a fascinating issue: the music used for the recording has been edited from that which was originally produced by Emily Howell. Specifically in Land of Stone, Opus 3, passages are modified, instruments and parts are added and rhythms, octaves, and dynamics are changed. Also, comparing the score markings in Land of Stone to From Darkness, Light, Opus 1, there are significant differences in the quantity of markings. While From Darkness, Light is very loosely annotated (in the style of Bach, as seen below), the later work, for a chamber orchestra, is mired by articulations, stylistic directions and various dynamic and tempo markings.

name
From Darkness, Light, ii. Fugue, measures 7-9

I have broken down the changes into four categories: additions or subtractions; modifications (excluding passages that could conceivably be attributed to player error—in the last major section, from measures 165-263, the rhythms become complex and the accuracy of the recording suffers in this section, thus only pitch, register, and additions are considered there); errors (i.e. passages that are impossible or that contain incoherent markings); and passages that can reasonably be assumed to have stylistic markings not originating from the computer. There were at least 12 additions or subtractions, 29 modifications, 68 edits, and 17 errors in the 275 measures that comprise this piece.5

This lead me to contact Nicole Paiement, the music director of Ensemble Parallèle, the group that recorded Land of Stone for Cope’s commercial recording. She confirmed much of what I had inferred regarding the active editing of the work. When asked if and how the piece changed, she said:

There was more of an evolution of the piece prior to the performance. As we started to work on the piece we adapted things that were not working as well… So it was as if [Cope] sort of became the computer-composer. So he would listen, and most times he agreed, and at times he said, “we would keep that,” but generally speaking David was very agreeable to doing the changes that would make the piece a better piece.

Where then does this leave Emily Howell’s work? Aside from its inability to properly grasp the capacity of the instruments in the orchestra (i.e. asking a harp to crescendo and decrescendo with a single struck note, as in measures 12-13, writing out of the range of an instrument, such as the D5 written for the contrabass in measure 185), it is clear that Cope felt free to edit and modify “Emily’s” work as he saw it fit. In most every case of an addition (i.e. mm. 65-85, the addition of the harp and glockenspiel outlining the suggested harmonies in the bassoon and clarinet, various examples of instruments moved 8va or 8vb because the range it was written in was not conducive to the mood, the flute introduced a measure before each of the “bell-like” sections, measures 138, 149, 154), there is a good musical reasoning for it. Furthermore, specialized stylistic additions turn theoretical structures into quasi-lyrical passages, such as the addition of Senza Tempo at measure 57, allowing the pianist to freely explore a somewhat random twelve-tone quasi-aggregate6 phrase:

name
Land of Stone, Measures 57-58

So while Cope states in his program notes for Land of Stone that:

My role with Emily is to provoke her to compose good music, and once composed, act as her impresario—her agent —to obtain performances, recordings, and so on…

It is clear that he is integral to the compositional process. Despite his assertion that Emily Howell produces “good music” on her own, the interference with the program’s output, both through his editing and Paiement’s critiques, suggests that his claim of computer-composed music is still a distant vision.

Emily is a testament to the nature of music: by parsing compositions down to their bare elements, she offers definitive proof of music as a language. She can rapidly produce composite works, changing the way à la carte music is created for daily consumption, but let’s not confuse these experiments in mass-produced Muzak with human attempts to create art.

As this discussion moves toward the perspective of the audience member, an important question arises: Do people need a relationship with a composer?

To illustrate this question regarding audiences and their expectations, I offer the prostitute metaphor. A prostitute is paid for by friends of a particular person without his knowledge. She is instructed to approach him at a party as if she were genuinely interested in him. The man cannot believe his good fortune—she is the paradigm of what a woman should be. She is beautiful, intelligent, and finds him witty and humorous. The man brings her home and wakes in the morning to find her gone. Disheartened, he calls his closest friend to recount his brief encounter with love, only to be told that all of his perceptions were ill-conceived. He made the assumption that when she approached him at the party, she found him attractive. He then further assumed that she was enjoying the time spent with him as they conversed and flirted. As he went to sleep that night, he most certainly assumed that she would at least be there the next morning.

Does this man’s discovery that his conception of the relationship was based on a lie change his appreciation of the event? I believe he might be forced to see it as nothing more than a mechanical act, destroying his concept of the presumed relationship.
There is an argument that music is nothing more than notes on a page. In theory, it is. It can sit in a cabinet for centuries and be as irrelevant as the dust that collects upon it. Yet once it is performed, there are inherent implications; including the assumption that this is an interaction between a composer and a listener. Only Emmy and Emily Howell can truly be impartial to music, breaking it down to its elemental roots without any response to the composite sound. As human beings, we have been exposed to music, and “understand” the language (although different dialects and varying degrees of “literacy” and natural sensitivity exist).

Another issue to take into account when considering the public: Who owns Emily Howell’s intellectual property rights? First, the issue of her sources needs to be discussed. Cope says of her musical sources:

In January of 2003, I retired my Experiments in Musical Intelligence program (Emmy).

My reasons were many, but mostly this retirement resulted from my desire to get on with my life. I had for years envisioned a new program which, unlike Emmy, included many aspects of computational creativity that Emmy did not include (I discuss this in depth in my book Computer Models of Musical Creativity, MIT Press, 2005). I call this new program Emily Howell.

Interestingly, the database for Emily Howell consists mainly of music composed by Emmy, thus linking this new program with my previous work in rather explicit and intimate ways. Emily’s style, a hybrid of the many styles which Emmy emulated during her twenty-year career, has fits and starts of Ivesian-sounding pastiches. My goal involves her creating a completely new style — a composite of those that most effectively complement one another.7

Emmy was intended solely to create additional material in the style of a previous composer, so her musical sources were (officially) the great composers of the past, as well as works by Cope. Yet theoretically, any composer could be plugged into the program to produce something similar. Assuming an orchestra wanted to perform a piece by Copland, but didn’t want to pay the rental fees, they could plug several pieces of Copland into the program and title the work Hommage à Copland. Unscrupulous composers could freely exploit works by their colleagues, using Emily Howell to create a work using sources from several pieces still under copyright. Or it could cheapen contemporary composition altogether, as Cope freely suggests in his original reasoning for creating Emmy—writer’s block.

These aspects should be troubling to anyone in the field of music. If the cost of producing “new” music through Emily is exponentially lower and the product created faster than through traditional composition, there is no question that it would be widely used. Yet the previously established inability of Emily to create truly original work will prevent music from evolving. Living composers, already struggling to exist outside of academia, simply won’t have the ability to compete, and Milton Babbitt’s vision of composition as a science completely removed from the real world, summarized in his article “Who Cares if You Listen?,”8 will be a reality.

Something which I had initially hope to explore further was Emily Howell’s ability to set text. Specifically because Cope said he originally used Emmy to complete an opera, and one of Emily Howell’s five works is From the Willow’s Keep, Op. 4, I requested this score from Cope with the hopes of offering a critical analysis, but was only provided with Land of Stone and From Darkness, Light. At the same time, there is no documented text in the English language with the phrase “From the Willow’s Keep,” so the text for his piece may have been produced by Cope’s “Poet Program.”9 As it relates to contemporary popular composition, the setting of text would be immensely important. Cope alluded to a “well-known pop group” inquiring about utilizing Emily Howell,10 thus the practical applications in popular music must be considered. “Emily Howell is adaptable and egolessly self-modifying in her ability to respond to audience criticism.”11 This is an audacious claim, both as it relates to classical and popular music. First, how is Emily able to evaluate and respond to audience criticism? Is she evaluating based upon “hoots and hollers?” Can she distinguish between a hoot and a holler? Presumably, she is responding using a decibel meter—but this cannot really compare a room full of jeers to a room full of cheers (or more likely a combination of both). Possibly in the future, each member of the audience will be connected to a device measuring serotonin levels, and a “Matrix”-esque construction of the auditory experience will be a reality. Furthermore, since standard concert etiquette suggests that audiences only show signs of approval or disapproval at the end of a piece, how exactly does this egoless self-modification occur? How does she “realize” that a certain note, passage, or even section was disliked? This again is a romanticized notion of Emily functioning without the help of Cope. Yet going further, her egoless state means she fundamentally has no artistic integrity. Right now she produces “pretty” music. Warren Riddle, editor for the popular tech magazine Switched, ended his optimistic article on Cope’s work with the bombastic tirade:

The current offerings (of Emily Howell) may be limited, but they’re definitely more appealing than the soulless, conformist tripe that so-called “humans” are currently regurgitating at an alarming rate.

Is there nothing to stop Emily Howell from churning out “soulless, conformist tripe”? She is nothing but a computer program, and can be utilized in a myriad of ways.

Regarding the practical application of Emily Howell to popular music, it could be the device that ultimately ends professional music on any level. Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and any number of other music simulation games offer people with no prerequisite capacity for music the opportunity to feel like they are creating it. If Emily Howell were widely distributed, anyone could mix their favorite five songs together to create a composite they would feel is theirs. In theory it is “music for the masses,” no holds barred, but in reality, once the computer becomes the originator instead of facilitator, communication ceases to happen, and the product reverts back to irrelevant sounds.

There may come a time when computers achieve true artificial intelligence, at which point, much of this argument will be moot. I am hesitant to stand in the way of progress, and historically some of the greatest inventions of our time were eviscerated by critics of their time for being the downfall of some great legacy. I believe, however, that the benefits of Emily Howell and other computer-composed technologies are currently exaggerated and little more than novelties, and as we explore this new frontier of computer-assisted composition, we should be wary of potential negative consequences.

***

Notes

[Ed. Note: In addition to the comments and references cited below, Noah Stern Weber, the author of the present article, wanted to cite Andrew Aziz’s article, “Algorithmic Style Analysis,” a history and evolution of artificial intelligence as it relates to music analysis and composition, which focuses on Cope quite a bit. According to Weber, “The article is fairly technical, but is the best discussion of the actual compositional process that is shorter than a book. It may be too esoteric for a general audience, but I found it very helpful as I began my research for this article. I believe it would be of interest to those who want to learn more on the subject.”—FJO]

1.“Unfortunately, I fear that she, like all of us involved with the making of new art, faces a hellish uphill battle, for all too often, performers, reviewers, and audiences rely on the proven rather than on the risky, and choose to repeat rather than initiate our creative experiences. What a shame that Emily’s music, like the music of her human counterparts, will most likely find itself buried in complacency, never having the opportunity to be heard and appreciated in her time.”—Excerpted from the Introductory Notes to the Emily Howell CD From Darkness, Light, Centaur 3023 (2010))

2. The Loebner Competition, an annual test of a computer’s capacity to pass the Turing Test is limited to a five-minute discussion. The computer’s best course of action was summarized by three time “Most Human Computer Award” Winner Richard Wallace as engaging in “stateless” conversation. “Experience with [Wallace’s chatbot] ALICE indicates that most casual conversation is ‘stateless,’ that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history of the conversation required to formulate the reply.” The programs that do best in the Loebner Competition tend to speak like a teenager through text-message, preprogrammed with stock responses, pop-culture references, and innocuous jokes. When it does not know how to respond, it abruptly changes the subject. (For a discussion on the Loebner Competition and AI, see: Brian Christian, “Mind vs. Machine,” The Atlantic, March 2011.)

3.A standard unmatcheable message from eHarmony: eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive testing of married individuals. One of the requirements for it to work successfully is for participants to fall into our rigorously defined profiles. If we aren’t able to match a user well using these profiles, the most considerate approach is to inform them early in the process… Our matching system is not suitable for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply would not benefit from our service.

4. This returns to the idea of suspended rationality. Howell’s algorithms only allow for an averaging of the discrepancies between a work and her core knowledge. If ten Emily Howells were given the task of analyzing the same series of works and producing something with that composite, the output would be very similar. Humans will be drawn to different elements of the series and will produce markedly different works. Our learning is idiosyncratic; it is what differentiates personalities and dispositions. We valuate new ideas by combining our past knowledge with our personal aesthetics and tastes. A person can be fundamentally changed by a concept that challenges their preconceived notions of a subject—Emily Howell’s algorithm can only weigh it against what it already knows.

5.Because of size constraints, I could not highlight the vast majority of these issues, but a copy of the score with each discrepancy can be downloaded at noahsweber.com/supplement.htm.

6.This cycle repeats every two measures: Nine of the twelve tones are used repeatedly, avoiding the last three. The missing tones are played simultaneously by the accented piano and the clarinet (later the flute), completing the aggregate, at which point the sequence begins again.

7.Excerpted from the introductory notes included in the score of Land of Stone.

8.“The attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as ‘serious,’ ‘advanced,’ contemporary music. This composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy—and, usually, considerable money—on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. He is, in essence, a “vanity” composer. The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. The majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow ‘professionals’. At best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.” (“Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity, VIII/2 [February 1958] pp38-40, 126-7.)

9.Cope has written a program similar to Brutus.1 which composes poems.

10.Warren Riddle, ” A Robo-Symphony: David Cope Composes ‘Human’ Music With A.I.Switched, February 27, 2010.

11.Surfdaddy Orca, “Has Emily Howell Passed the Turing Test?,” H+ Magazine, March 22, 2010

***

name
Noah Stern Weber

Noah Stern Weber is the Founder and President of Burning Bayreuth, a concert series devoted to innovative presentation of classical and contemporary music. He has degrees in clarinet and conducting from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Bard College-Conservatory of Music, and has served as assistant conductor for the Center City Opera Theater, the Luzerne Music Center, the Gulf Coast Symphony and École d’Art Americaines de Fontainebleau.

The Musical Interconnectivity of Man and Beast

“The stones cry out, bells shake the sky. All creation groans…Shhhh!!! [honestly, be quiet a while-particularly outside] Listen to it!”

—mewithoutyou, “O Porcupine”

name
Bird Song by Kenneth Rougeau
Used with permission of the artist.

Attempting to write about the interconnectivity of music and nature is a slippery endeavor pestered by paradoxes. The relationship between the two is at once immediate, tangible, visceral, but also elusive, ethereal, ultimately incomprehensible and seemingly just beyond our reach.

Of course, I am not the first person to ponder this issue, nor will I be the last. In an intensely illuminative anthology called The Book of Music & Nature, co-editor David Rothenberg begins to elucidate the intricacies of music’s connective function within the confines of nature:

You will hear compositions that mirror the workings of nature in their manner of operation, an aesthetic dream most often attributed to John Cage. Cage learned of it from art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, who had extracted it from Aristotle’s vision of techne—a word that once meant both ‘art’ and ‘tool.’ Addressing nature as a manner of operation, we complete processes that have been left unfinished, leaving a place for the ingenuity that so marks human presence on the earth.

But no music can exist without the given ways that sound behaves, with or without the human impulse to organize and perceive it. At the same time, music seems to be about little else beside itself—the play of tones up and away, the game of noise and silence.

Perhaps no one musical composition is as revelatory in this game Rothenberg writes of than Cage’s iconoclastic 4’33”. In the book Noise/Music: A History, Paul Hegarty wrote perceptively about this compositional game changer—”The world, then, is revealed as infinitely musical: musicality is about our attentiveness to the sounds of the world.”

In an essay contained in The Book of Music & Nature entitled “Music and the Soundscape,” composer and author R. Murray Schafer places the discussion within a broader multicultural context by reminding us that in many cultures—African and North American Indian ones particularly—there is no equivalent word for “music.” “Much of the soundmaking in these cultures might be better described as ‘tone magic,’ ” asserts Schafer. This statement suggests that what we would call the “music” of these cultures abdicates control to the surrounding environment, and attributes much of the creative process to nature. This mystical perspective on sound is inevitably tied to a culture’s collective internalization of spirituality. In contrast, Western culture tends to differentiate strongly between the surrounding environment, music, and the setting in which it is made. There are the sounds that inhabit nature, and then there are the sounds that inhabit the concert hall.

Schafer sets forth a basic dichotomy between the Western culture of European descent, most easily examined within the context of the Christian musical tradition, and non-Western culture. He excavates the former’s musical manifestation of the Judeo-Christian tradition in this way:

We recall that the ancient Greeks originally employed the word mousike for a whole range of spiritual and intellectual activities before it gradually took on the more restricted meaning we have inherited. Ours is a special concept, nourished in the crucible of European civilization, from which it went out (along with Europeans) to many other parts of the world. What makes it special is its abstraction from daily life, its exclusivity. It has become an activity that requires silence for its proper presentation—containers of silence called music rooms. It exhibits the signs of a cult or a religion and to those outside who have not been initiated into its rituals it must appear strange and abnormal….

Schafer later illuminates how the architecture of the Christian Church—beginning with the construction of medieval cathedrals—has in part dictated how we experience music in a space.

The music of the cathedral is unseen; it rises vapor-like to fill a large resonant space, restricting harmonic and melodic mobility to produce a hazy wash of sound blending with the mystique of Christianity’s invisible God….The medieval schoolmen spoke of God as a presence whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. It is an acoustic definition of God…

Reductively speaking, there is an alternative mode of listening, which is based on the inclusiveness of life’s activities and the environment in which one partakes of them, rather than the exclusivity of the Western church tradition, which went on to inform the “classical” concert experience, protocol, and decorum.

name
A 1992 Princeton University Press book that attempts to come to terms with the music of nature.

Tsai Chih Chung captures the inherent potency of this alternative listening style in the poignant comic book Zhuanzi Speaks: The Music of Nature, and specifically in the excerpt “Zhao Wen Quits the Zither.”

Once there was a famous zither player named Zhao Wen who could play the zither like no one else. But one day, Zhao Wen suddenly stopped playing the zither altogether. He finally realized that in playing one sound, it would be to the neglect of all the other sounds. It was only when he wasn’t playing that he could hear everything in complete harmony. The principles of music and wood carving are alike—when a wood carving is finished, it has been created at the expense of all the wood that has been carved away. Only the music of nature is complete and undiminished.

Here, the comic book’s characters exhibit a non-Western approach to music and the practical philosophy from which it derives its potency. That approach is strikingly similar to what Schafer refers to as peripheral listening. “…the ear remains open to sounds from any direction or distance, scanning the environment for information from anywhere. It’s the perceptual attitude of people who live outdoors or whose jobs involve movement from one place to another. The world is always full of sounds.”

 

*

name
In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen suggests that music is not the exclusive domain of human beings.

If we follow the lead of Cage, whose final definition of music is “sounds heard,” it seems that one could infer that music is not merely a human creation or experience. Sounds—all sounds, any sounds—created by humans and non-humans alike, exhibit a kind of music.

In the fascinating book The Singing Neanderthals, University of Reading Professor Steven Mithen offers several pieces of corroborating evidence that suggest the making of “music” is not an activity confined to the human species. Helsinki University psychologist Lea Leinonen’s studies demonstrated that humans—children and adults alike—could identify the emotional content of macaque monkey calls, and as such, “share the same vocal cues in emotional communication.” There is also Bruce Richman’s eight-year study of the vocalizations of gelada monkeys:

The acoustic feature that most interested Richman was the great variety of rhythms and melodies that the geladas use: “Fast rhythms, slow rhythms, staccato rhythms, glissando rhythms; first-beat accented rhythms, end-accented rhythms; melodies that have evenly spaced musical intervals covering a range of two or three octaves; melodies that repeat exactly, previously produced, rising or falling musical intervals; and on and on: geladas vocalize a profusion of rhythmic and melodic forms.”…he concluded that they performed much the same function as the rhythm and melody that is found in human speech and singing.

But the case for a non-human music can also be made, in part, by human activity. Mithen cites numerous cases of musical savants who exhibit profound mental acuity in music while demonstrating severe linguistic deficiencies. He also points to Stanford University’s Dr. Anne Fernald, and her studies of infant-directed speech, or IDS, in which—universally across the linguistic and cultural barriers—” ‘the melody is the message’—the intention of the speaker can be gained from the prosody alone.”

Examples of such sounds evidenced in the second stage of IDS, are as follows:

When soothing a distressed infant, an adult is more likely to use low pitch and falling pitch contours; when trying to engage attention and elicit a response, rising pitch contours are more commonly used. If an adult is attempting to maintain a child’s gaze, then here speech will most likely display a bell-shaped contour. Occasions when adults need to discourage very young infants are rare; but when these do arise IDS takes on a similar character to the warning signals found in-non-human primates—brief and staccato, with steep, high-pitched contours.

In comparing IDS with pet-directed speech, or PDS, Dennis Burnham of the University of Western Sydney found a similar prominence of prosody in PDS. The substantial difference was that in IDS both the emotional and linguistic needs of the hearer are met, whereas because of a lack of language among the animals, PDS meets only emotional needs.

The second word in Cage’s definition is key: heard. If music is sounds heard, then that also inevitably means that the sounds must be heard in order to constitute music.

While we know that non-human creatures can and do hear, we do not necessarily know to what extent these beings comprehend the sounds they hear. Even when we do have a general idea as to a particular animal’s comprehension of sound, as in the example of mating calls, our system of defining and organizing sounds in a codified way is predicated on human language and development, and not animal language or development. We can hear and appreciate the sounds of animals, and we can interpret those sounds in light of our system of sound organization called music, but we cannot really begin to interpret their sounds using their particular languages. We simply do not presently have the ability to speak those languages.

In The Singing Neanderthals, Professor Mithen’s central argument is that music and language as we now recognize them evolved from a sophisticated form of communication used by our early, non-human ancestors, which Mithen calls “Hmmmmm”—communication that was “holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic.”

The fact that the music and language systems in the brain share some modules is also to be expected given the evolutionary history I have proposed, because we now know that both originate from a single system. Conversely, the fact that they also have their own independent modules is a reflection of up to two hundred thousand years of independent evolution. The modules related to pitch organization would once have been central to ‘Hmmmmm’ but are now recruited only for music (with a possible exception in those who speak tonal languages); while other ‘Hmmmmm’ modules might now be recruited for the language system alone—perhaps, for example those relating to grammar.

David Cope, composer, author, computer programmer, and professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, sees a clear and strong distinction to be made between language and music, which he defines as “a progression of sounds and silence that means nothing.” This binary paradigm of human expression, which consists of language and music, is far different from the integrated form of expression that Mithen envisions in “Hmmmmm,” which seems closely related to the emotional/linguistic communication of IDS. Cope elaborates on music, “It’s extremely important to us to have this emotional feedback, if you will, but it is not meant to convey meaning from once source to another, like language is, and I feel very strongly about that. It provokes, it doesn’t communicate.”

 

*

 

” And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Illúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, “Ainulindalë: The Music of the Ainur”

In David Rothenberg’s view, a language barrier does not preclude collaborative music-making from occurring between humans and animals. In a Discovery Channel blog post from November 2010, the author/editor/composer/clarinetist made a poignant analogy:

As a jazz musician I know how exciting it is to jam with a musician who can’t speak my language but can make sense of my music as I play along with theirs. It’s astonishing to realize this can also work with other species—from birds, to bugs. Even to humpback whales, the animal with the longest, most moving music in the natural world, a sound that can be heard underwater from ten miles away; a song with clear melodies, phrases, rhythms and parts that takes the whale twenty minutes to sing before he starts the cycle over again, in performances that last up to twenty three hours.

name
David Rothenberg
Photo by David Keller

Rothenberg’s jam sessions with whales are documented in the album simply titled Whale Music. The music’s compositional approach is distinctive in that neither the human musicians nor the whales appear dominant. This approach is in contrast to several compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries. Alan Hovhaness’s And God Created Great Whales evokes the great majesty of the animals as it “samples” their sound, while John Cage’s Litany for the Whale evokes their mystery and solitary beauty by instructing a pair of singers to simply chant the letters W-H-A-L-E. More recently, the song cycle Mount Wittenberg Orca by the avant-pop band Dirty Projectors and Björk employs the Western compositional technique called hocketing in order to give voice to kid whales.

While human expression is indeed dominant in George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), the true voice of the whale seems more apparent due to Crumb’s keenly idiomatic writing. The piece uses the conventional instrumentation of flute, cello, and piano to deftly imitate the sounds of the humpback whales. “I used kind of special ways of playing the flute and the cello to kind of suggest a little bit of the sense of the whale music—the glissandos, for example, the extremes in register, the very high flute as opposed to the low notes on the piano,” explains Crumb. “But it seems to me that music is never a true imitation of nature…like Beethoven in the Pastoral Symphony, nobody’s gonna run for their umbrella when they hear the ‘storm’ movement. It’s not a realistic storm, it’s an artistic evocation of a natural event.”

John Luther Adams’s Songbirdsongs is also a prime example of the utilization of Western instrumentation to accurately portray the natural sounds of animals. The emulation of birds here is so effective that at times it sounds as if one is not listening to human musicians at all, particularly on pieces such as “Mourning Dove.”

In the case of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, the artistic evocation stems from building musical architecture around recorded bird sounds. While the orchestra sometimes emulates the melodic and rhythmic movements of the birds, perhaps more importantly, it creates a new sonically symbiotic environment in which the bird sounds flourish. The real genius of Rautuvaara’s work is the way the overtly human musical exploits of the orchestra serve to heighten the listener’s sense of separation from the arctic birds. The soundscape here is ravishingly beautiful, but ultimately forbidding. One is left feeling the overwhelming, innate differences between mankind and birdkind, and not—as in the case of Songbirdsongs—the unifying similarities.

name
Judith Shatin
Photo by Peter Schaff

Opposite Cantus Arcticus on the spectrum of human/bird interaction is composer Judith Shatin’s For The Birds. In this work for amplified cello and electronics, the sonic similarities between the cello’s phrases, the recorded bird sounds, and the subsequent electronic manipulation of those bird sounds result in an integrated soundscape in which the identities of the individual sound sources dissolve. In their place, the timbres creates an illusory “single source” that implicitly underscores the unity between humans and birds.

The exploration of animal sounds through composition is by no means a recent phenomenon. Crumb acknowledges that Western music has a long history of evoking the sounds of nature, from Rameau’s La poule (chicken) and Debussy’s La Mer, to Bartók’s “night music,” and Messiaen’s numerous works inspired by birds, such as Réveil des Oiseaux and Catalogue d’oiseaux.

Like Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, Rothenberg’s Whale Music portrays the animals less abstractly, but it gives them a more prominent role in the compositional process. If Rothenberg’s role was made dominant, the music might sound like some insufficient emulation of whales. If the animals were given complete precedence, though, the result might be more akin to an ambient soundscape.

Instead, Rothenberg offers the listener what sounds like a balanced partnership, a concerted effort in producing a music that is equal parts human and whale. But how was this music achieved? The musician explains:

I’m playing my clarinet onboard a boat into a microphone that’s plugged into an underwater speaker, so the notes I play are being broadcast out into the sound world of the whales. Then I’m wearing headphones which are attached to an underwater microphone, called a hydrophone, which is listening live to the underwater sound environment, which includes the singing whale and my deep sea burbling clarinet, altogether. It’s kind of like a recording studio where each player is isolated in a separate booth, except one booth is the whole ocean with a forty foot whale in it, singing the one song he needs to know.

Perhaps the most compelling of the Whale Music sessions is the opening track “Valentine’s Day 1992,” in which the whale utterances sound like that of some ancient and roughhewn underwater shofar, with a tremulous timbre and ethereal, glissandi-laden melodic motives. In its duet with the whale, Rothenberg’s clarinet seems imbued with a soulful purpose—and in deep drones it mirrors the enigmatic moan of the animal as the track fades out.

Schafer describes this kind of interaction in “Music and the Soundscape”: “When the reciprocity between music and the soundscape is effectively intuited, the interaction can be like that of text and subtext, as when the rhythms of work or the motions of tools inspire the singer, or bird song inspires the flutist.”

But can the flutist—or in the case of Rothenberg, the clarinetist—inspire bird song? If his album Why Birds Sing is any indication, the answer is most certainly “Yes.” The duet “White-Crested Laugh,” in which a white-crested laughing thrush joins Rothenberg in song, finds man and bird playing off one another in a series of free-spirited improvisations. Of the experience, Rothenberg wrote on his “Why Birds Sing” web site, “I had no idea a bird could interact so spontaneously with a human musician.”

The clarinetist found that whales were capable of interacting in this way as well. “Most of the time the whales are not interested,” Rothenberg admits on the Discovery Channel blog.

But once in a while, when the sea is calm and one great beast is right under the boat, so close that his moans can be felt right through the hull, sometimes he changes his song when he hears what I play. At those moments I feel a true sense of awe, that music is something really big; bigger than our whole species, something written right into the fabric of all life whose beauty is far beyond our ability to explain, or even feel its purpose.

Rothenberg seems fully aware of the apparent lack of practicality inherent in such a musical endeavor. “What use is a whale song in our human world?” he asks. “It reminds us that we are not the only musicians on Earth, and that if we want to understand the natural world beyond our narrow human concerns, we have to listen to and appreciate the full range of animal musics that have been on this planet for millions of years before humans ever got here.”

 

*

 

name
Members of the Thai Elephant Orchestra in performance
Photo by Millie Young

In sharp contrast to Rothenberg’s music, which meets the animals more or less “where they live”—within their own natural environment as they produce sounds without any direct human influence—there is the example of the Thai Elephant Orchestra, or TEO. Co-founded by composer Dave Soldier and conservationist Richard Lair, TEO consists of six to eighteen elephants performing on percussion instruments specifically designed for them, under the direction of Soldier and Lair, and with the assistance of elephant trainers known as mahouts. The instruments employed include the renaat (made of industrial steel tubes and akin to the xylophone), tuned rattles called angalungs, a gong, thundersheet, harmonicas, Issan bells, and various drums.

Regarding the extent to which human involvement influences the music-making process, Soldier writes:

I don’t think it’s interesting to teach elephants to play prewritten human melodies. It’s much more interesting to hear how they “choose to play”. After teaching the elephants to play the instruments and giving some indication of how the instrument should be played for that piece, Richard or I would cue the elephant and mahout to start and stop. The mahout would encourage his animal by moving his arms in a mime of the elephant’s trunk.

What we hear from the elephants is not the “source material.” For that we would have to hear the elephants’ own trumpeting, rather than what is essentially the mimicking of human behavior. Instead, the draw here seems not to be that the elephants themselves are creating music on their own, but rather that the elephants are playing instruments that humans would normally play.

Because the majority of the sounds are being made on what are essentially human instruments, we are faced with the fact that elephants are being asked to speak our musical language, and not their own. However, in the case of works such “Little Elephant Saddle”—which appears on the 2004 recording Elephonic Rhapsodies—elephant vocalizations can be heard in concert with human musicians. The result sounds natural and organic. The listener is left with the sense that we have happened upon the animals in their element, so as to join them in their song, rather than taking them out of their element, intent on having them sing our song.

Contrast the music of the Thai Elephant Orchestra with Eberhard Schoener’s work Sky Music, for which the composer attached bells and whistles to carrier pigeons, before releasing them into a wind tunnel. As with the TEO, the birds are—through human interference—creating sounds they would not normally make. The difference here is that Schoener has not called upon the birds to act in ways that are not “bird-like.” Simply through the act of flying, the birds contribute to the partially artificial soundscape (the cooing of the pigeons can also be heard). The animals are ostensibly still in their element, and the process of sound creation does not come off as a contrivance.

name
A recent CD recording of John Cage’s Bird Cage

In John Cage’s 1972 work for 12 tapes, entitled Bird Cage, the interaction between humans and animals is perhaps at its most artificial. Here, the composer inserts the sounds found in aviaries and the sounds of human activity, into the same contextual environment, which also includes Cage himself singing. The composer then applies chance procedures to determine the arrangement and sonic alterations of the recordings. The juxtaposition of electronic manipulations and the more “natural” bird sounds can sound bizarre and discordant; the admixture of sounds, at first, seems entirely arbitrary. Upon further listening, however, the disparate timbres coalesce, and one is struck with how realistic this “artificial” environment is when compared with our own. The soundscape of the world in which we live does not separate animal sounds from human sounds—all are melded together into a singular, dense, and inundated sonic atmosphere.

The allure of music—whether created by humans or animals—is in its mystery. And we don’t have to unravel the enigma to enjoy it in all its various languages. Humans don’t need to know why birds can mimic our musical production. And whales don’t need to know why humans place microphones in their home. What’s truly important is that we, humans and non-humans alike, continue to do such things. There is something inherently beautiful about embracing the harmonious differences between species with enthusiastic wonder. We may not ever learn what the birds are really singing, but we will learn more about our surroundings and how we fit within their confines.

 

*

 

name
Daniel J. Kushner

Daniel J. Kushner is an arts journalist, music critic, and blogger for The Huffington Post. His work has also been published in Opera News, Symphony, and The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. His blog, You’re So Post-Post-Rock Right Now—which includes a recent three-part series on the Ecstatic Music Festival—can be found at postpostrock.com.