We got both kinds, country and western

In a few weeks, I’m going to be doing some guest blogging on NewMusicBox. I’m very excited, but also a bit nervous, because I’m an outspoken anti-fan of avant-garde modernism. I don’t want to antagonize NMB’s readership, so I’m trying to figure out how to write about this stuff without being a jerk. I’m using this post to do some thinking out loud.

NMB’s mission statement on their web site says that they are “dedicated to the music of American composers and improvisers and their champions.” To get a clearer sense of their musical identity and mission, I went and listened to their 2014 staff picks. The list encompasses tracks that sound to me like showtunes, jazzy chamber music, bluegrass-ish folk, artsy funky indie rock, avant-garde jazz, modern classical played on Japanese instruments, ambient, modernist opera, classical voice over glitchy electronica, and “regular” modern classical. Only a few of these tracks fit my image of what new music is, which just shows how out of touch I am. But my confusion could be forgiven. Does anyone even have a clear definition of “new music”?

One might naively say that new music is all the music that’s new. A Google search of the term brings up many web sites devoted to new music, ranging from rock to pop to hip-hop to everything else. Every tribe has their specific idea of what “music” constitutes. The Blues Brothers puts it best.

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Sampling composers

Morey, J., & McIntyre, P. (2014). The Creative Studio Practice of Contemporary Dance Music Sampling Composers. Dancecult, 6(1), 41–60.

There is so much to love about this paper, starting with the title. You can read it the way it was intended, that dance music producers are composers. Or you can creatively misread it to mean that the dance producers are using samples of other composers. It works equally well either way.

Sampling consists of acts of listening, selecting and editing

In the age of the internet, effectively any sound that has ever been recorded becomes available raw material for new music. The challenge with sampling isn’t so much identifying possible sample sources as it is managing the vast universe of possibilities. The listening and selecting steps in the sampling process are really the hard parts. The editing and looping are comparatively easy.

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Talent considered harmful

My fellow radical music educator Jared O’Leary wrote a pretty remarkable paper with a deceptively dry title: A Content Analysis on the Use of the Word ‘Talent’ in the Journal of Research in Music Education, 1953-2012. It got me thinking about talent, and what a pernicious concept it is.

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Pop songwriting in the age of the Digital Audio Workstation

Bennett, J. (2011). Collaborative songwriting – the ontology of negotiated creativity in popular music studio practice. Journal on the Art of Record Production, (5), online.

My professional life at the moment mostly consists of teaching classical and jazz musicians how to write pop songs. While every American is intuitively familiar with the norms of pop music, few of us think about them explicitly, even trained musicians. It’s worth considering them, though. While individual pop songs might be musically uninteresting, in the aggregate they’re a rich source of information about the way our culture evolves. Joe Bennett describes popular song as an “unsubsidized populist art form,” like Hollywood movies and video games. The marketplace exerts strong Darwinian pressures on songwriters and producers, polishing pop conventions like pebbles being tumbled in a river.

Tin Pan Alley

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The poetics of rock

I’m teaching at Montclair State University because of Adam Bell, a fellow self-taught rock and pop musician turned academic. Adam loves to quote The Poetics of Rock by Albin Zak, and rightly so.

Albin Zak - The Poetics of Rock

Zak’s major point is that rock is an art form about making records, and that the creativity in making records is only partially in the songs and the performances. A major part of the art form is the creation of sound itself. It’s the timbre and space that makes the best recordings come alive as much as any of the “musical” components. We need some better language to describe the different components that go into making a rock record, or any kind of recording.

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Mixing “Call Me Maybe”

Sound On Sound magazine ran this highly detailed account of mixing the inescapable summer jam of 2012. It’s the most thorough explanation of a contemporary pop song’s mix process that I’ve ever read.

The specifics of the gear and the plugins are interesting, but the main takeaway is just how complex and nuanced the soundscape of pop music can be. “Real musicians” tend to dismiss this kind of song for its melodic and harmonic simplicity, but the real creativity is in the sound itself, the details of the vocals and synths and drums. “Call Me Maybe” leaps out of the speakers at you, demanding your attention, managing both to pound you with sonic force and intrigue you with quiet detail. Whether you want your attention grabbed in this way is a matter of taste. I happen to love the song, but even if it isn’t your cup of tea, the craft behind it bears some thinking about.

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First day of music tech class

I recently began my second semester of teaching Music Technology 101 at Montclair State University. In a perfect world, I’d follow Mike Medvinsky’s lead and dive straight into creative music-making on day one. However, there are logistical reasons to save that for day two. Instead, I started the class with a listening party, a kind of electronic popular music tasting menu. I kicked things off with “Umbrella” by Rihanna.

I chose this song because of its main drum loop, which is a factory sound that comes with GarageBand called Vintage Funk Kit 03–slow it down to 90 bpm and you’ll hear it. The first several class projects use GarageBand, and I like the students to feel like they’re being empowered to create real music in the class, not just performing academic exercises.

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Composing speech

Robert Davidson’s first-ever tweet is a remarkable one:

https://twitter.com/robcomposer/status/558447982807248896

Rob’s tweet raises three profound questions in my mind. Continue reading “Composing speech”

Listening, hearing, and the infinite loop

Rob Walker wrote a blog post listing different strategies for how to pay attention. (Update: he later wrote a whole book about it, I’m quoted in it.) Deep attention makes the difference between looking at something and actually seeing it. Rob is talking mostly to visual artists and designers, but his methods work well for musicians too–seeing is to looking as hearing is to listening. Paying attention is the most basic skill an artist needs in any medium, and one of the most basic skills a person needs in life. Not only does artistic practice require attention, but it also helps you learn attention. When you look critically at a painting or listen critically to a song, you are disciplining your attentional system.

Being able to focus deeply has its obvious practical benefits, but it’s also an invaluable tool for making your emotional life more manageable. It’s significant to me that the image below appears in two different Wikipedia articles: attention and flow.

Attention, and flow

When people ask me why we should study the arts, I think the attention argument is the best answer. The variety of deep attention known as mindfulness is a powerful antidepressant. Teaching the arts isn’t just about cultural preservation and transmission; it’s also a cost-effective public health measure. Music isn’t the only method for practicing your attention, but it’s one of the best. This post will address my preferred method for focusing my musical attention: the infinite loop.

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Subverting music education

Kratus, J. (2015). The Role of Subversion in Changing Music Education. In C. Randles (Ed.), Music Education: Navigating the Future (pp. 340–346). New York & London: Routledge.

Music Education: Navigating the Future

Here’s a horrifying story from John Kratus:

In 2009 I gave a presentation on collegiate curricular change in music for the Society for Music Teacher Education in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first slides in my presentation was an outline of Michigan State University’s degree requirements for the Bachelor of Music in Music Education. The outline included certain numbers of semesters for applied lessons, large ensembles, theory and ear training, and history and literature, as well as music education requirements including three tracks (instrumental, string, choral/general), introduction to music education, conducting, instrument and voice classes dependent on student teaching. I asked the audience members how many of them taught in a college program similar to that. Nearly every hand went up. Then I revealed that the program I described was taken from the Michigan State University Academic Programs book from 1959. The course descriptions, the performance repertoire, even the delivery of instruction were, for all, practical purposes, nearly unchanged in 50 years.

Kratus goes on to say that music education is way more than fifty years out of date.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the type of music education provided to contemporary collegiate music majors has deep roots in the conservatories of European capitols of the 19th century. In fact more than its roots are located there–21st-century collegiate music has retained the stems, branches, leaves, flowers, seeds, and pollen of its 200-year-old predecessors.

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