Status report

Location: Chicago

Listening to: Miles Davis' Nefertiti ; The Well-Tuned Piano ; and whatever's on Counterstream.

Q from above: Why is it that only perhaps 1 in every 10 or 12 composers to come around on Counterstream were ever mentioned by anyone during my composition grad degree?

Corollary Q: Who picks the programming on Counterstream? Can I walk around in their record collection for a little while?

Reading: Alfred Sanchez Pinol, Cold Skin (mysterious island + Antarctica + unnamed narrator/protagonist = shamelessly easy home-run for this reader.)

Persistent, haunting image from above: Beset by nocturnal monsters, the narrator tries to scare them off by making a big fire, which entails burning every book he brought to the island--pretty much right after he gets there. It doesn't take him any time at all to decide to destroy his boxes of great literature from throughout history; it becomes clear that his neck is in question, and he torches the stuff on night 1.

Musing about: 1) the day-to-day realities of N winter, even though it hasn't even arrived, and how nice Austin used to feel this time of year, and how I'm already readopting an attitude of Midwestern haughtiness about it. Also, the suggestive brilliance of the word "sludge." 2) Ives' assertion that true music won't be heard until "the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever," and this dictum's implications for lifestyle choices in modern society (this is something that comes up often when one is making even less a "living" from his art than he was as a grad student). 3) The Fantastic Mr. Fox and its seamless porting of Wes Anderson's stylistic hallmarks from live action to animation. The critics think it works really well, and I agree, but it does raise philosophical questions, right? Directorial control v. role of actors, "humanity" of people in movies (they were never actually people to start with--screen images are just screen images), &c. 4) The difficulty of practicing piano in the city and how much keyboards just don't cut it, really. It's just not the same instrument. I heard McCoy Tyner doesn't have a piano in his domicile these days but just practices on a keyboard. Especially for someone like him, whose style is tied to the visceral power of the piano (those anchoring fifths in the bass!), this blows my mind. 5) I get to hear McCoy Tyner play next week! Badass. 6) Is it possible that my apathy re. rock concerts springs from antipathy not to noise but to amplified sound in general? I saw Old Crow Medicine Show the other week and while it was a blast, I couldn't hear. The banjo was absent from the mix and the whole sonic composite was flat and dead and uninteresting. If you don't believe me, play a chord on an acoustic guitar and hold the instrument up to your ear and listen to it decay, check out the complexity of that sound. Now put your ear right up to a speaker and listen to the same chord in a recorded incarnation. Not the same. I extend this logic to less fundamental aspects of the live music experience, like group interplay of the band up there. You can't really hear it in the same way when it's been separated, recombined, and repackaged before it gets to your ears. I've never been a big acoustic purity-/overtone series-obsessed guy, but I'm feeling passionate about this right now. Maybe if I keep going on this path I'll end up like Trimpin or Partch. I guess that would help with the Charles E. issue discussed above.

Theory: amplified sound is a necessity of population saturation and mass homogenization of culture. If there weren't a) so many of us, and if b) we weren't all interested in hearing the same 7 bands, we could still get our music the way they used to in the 19C, like in your living room with a couple friends. OK maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, but consider it. The other issue is whether our music is meant for actual listening at all or whether other social functions have become more important (of course they have, as any young American who's ever fallen asleep during a classical concert can tell you). But I believe there's a state of social listening that is possible, a music that you could hang out and even talk a bit during but still basically listen to, that some of our current models (house concerts, jazz clubs) are close to it, that we could have better listening experiences if we followed this trail further. And I believe that musicians are still important to music--laptops are instruments too, that's fine, but I never want to stop hearing a dude play an instrument, that's still what it's about, and you can write that on my tombstone.

Apology: Right, that was more than one theory and got long and utopian. But

Thesis: music is nothing more or less than listening. Listening strategies/goals/environments dictate what the music is more than chartable or dissertationable pitch content/thematic tightness or whatever other intrinsic, objective traits that you learn about in classes. We can change music for the better by changing the situations in which we receive (listen to) it. And we should.